Enclosure, Mornin, Co. Longford

Co. Longford |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Mornin, Co. Longford

On a gentle east-facing slope in County Longford, a low earthwork sits in open pasture, its outline easy to miss unless you are looking for it.

The enclosure measures roughly 52 metres north-northwest to south-southeast and about 30 metres across, enclosed by a bank of earth and stone that rises no more than 40 centimetres above the surrounding ground. There is no fosse, the defensive ditch that typically accompanies a ringfort bank, which makes this site harder to classify with confidence. What it is, precisely, remains an open question.

By the time the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map was produced in 1837, the enclosure was already being read as an irregularly shaped field boundary rather than a monument in its own right, which tells something about how thoroughly agricultural activity had already absorbed it into the working landscape. A report from 1976 noted that the original entrance lay on the south-eastern side, though sections of the bank along both the south-east and south-west have since been removed. The outer face elsewhere has been modified and folded into modern field boundaries. Immediately inside the bank at the south-south-west, a waterlogged area roughly four metres wide persists, and a short distance north of centre there is a slightly raised subtriangular platform, modest in scale at around eight metres by six and barely 15 centimetres above grade. Its relationship to the enclosure as a whole is not recorded.

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Pete F
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