Enclosure, Drumcleavry, Co. Roscommon

Co. Roscommon |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Drumcleavry, Co. Roscommon

In the pasture of Drumcleavry, County Roscommon, a circular enclosure roughly thirty metres across has all but vanished from the landscape.

It cannot be seen at ground level; the grass gives nothing away. The only real record of its existence comes from the 1837 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, which shows it as a circular form with trees around its perimeter, sitting on flat, low-lying ground. Those trees are gone now, and whatever earthwork once defined the boundary has settled so thoroughly into the soil that it leaves no trace a person standing in the field could detect.

The enclosure belongs to a cluster of related monuments in the same area. About sixty metres to the north-north-west lies a rath, the term used for a roughly circular earthen ringfort, typically built during the early medieval period as a farmstead enclosure. Nearby, a ring-ditch has also been recorded, and it is considered likely that this feature and the enclosure are actually the same monument seen from different angles of evidence, one captured by cartographers in the nineteenth century, the other identified through later survey methods. The convergence of these records in such a small area suggests this was once a meaningful patch of ground, even if the landscape now holds no outward sign of that.

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Pete F
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