Enclosure, Ballybeg, Co. Longford
Co. Longford |
Enclosures
Inside a tree-ring at Ballybeg in County Longford, pressed against the inner face of a bank on the western side, sits a small enclosure whose purpose nobody has satisfactorily explained.
It is sub-rectangular in plan, measuring roughly 6.3 metres east to west and 5.8 metres north to south, defined by a bank of earth and stone rising to about a metre in height. A gap 1.6 metres wide on the eastern side serves as the original point of entry. The date of the structure is uncertain, and that uncertainty is itself part of what makes it interesting.
The enclosure sits within what is recorded as a tree-ring, a circular or near-circular feature typically marked by the growth pattern of trees following the line of an older, underlying earthwork such as a ringfort bank. Tree-rings in Ireland often preserve the ghost of an earlier enclosure long after the original structure has been reduced to a slight rise in the ground, the trees rooting along the buried bank and outlining its curve for centuries. That this smaller enclosure is tucked against the inner face of that western bank suggests it was deliberately placed in relation to the larger feature, though whether it is contemporary with it, later, or significantly earlier is not known. A second possible enclosure lies to the north-north-east of the site, hinting that whatever activity once took place here was not confined to a single structure.