Embanked enclosure, Lustia, Co. Roscommon

Co. Roscommon |

Ringforts

Embanked enclosure, Lustia, Co. Roscommon

A circular earthwork with no visible entrance sits near the top of a drumlin slope in Lustia, Co. Roscommon, enclosed by forest on all sides yet left unplanted within it, a small grass-covered clearing that has quietly outlasted centuries of landscape change.

The enclosure measures roughly 26.5 to 27 metres in diameter, defined partly by an earthen bank and partly by a natural scarp, with a fosse, or outer ditch, betrayed on the south-east to south-west arc not by any obvious earthwork but by a band of rushes, those reliable indicators of waterlogged ground that so often mark where ancient digging disturbed the soil.

The absence of an entrance is one of the site's more puzzling features. Enclosures of this kind are generally interpreted as domestic or agricultural spaces, broadly comparable to a ringfort, though without excavated finds or dateable material the specific function here remains open. When forestry drainage work cut two channels through the interior in early 2020, the intervention prompted an emergency response rather than any simple backfilling. A full archaeological survey was carried out under supervision, the ground was reinstated as closely as possible to its former condition, and the exposed sections were recorded before closure. The section through the bank at the north-west revealed a brown silty clay with small stones, roughly two metres wide and 0.4 metres high, sitting at the inner edge of the fosse fill. No artefacts were recovered, which means the site's date and character remain unresolved, but the fosse itself had not been cut by the drainage work and survives intact beneath the surface.

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Pete F
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