Embanked enclosure, Lisnanuran, Co. Roscommon
Co. Roscommon |
Ringforts
On a low rise in the Roscommon countryside, a circular patch of grass sits quietly in the landscape, its edges marked by little more than a gentle slope in the ground.
To the untrained eye it reads as nothing, a slight irregularity in a field, but it is in fact the diminished remains of an embanked enclosure, a type of roughly circular earthwork that appears across Ireland and is associated variously with settlement, ritual, or boundary-marking in the early medieval and prehistoric periods.
What makes this particular enclosure quietly interesting is the way the cartographic record tracks its slow disappearance. On the 1837 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, it appears as a clearly defined circular feature with an external diameter of around thirty metres. By the 1911 edition it had already softened enough to be rendered as a hachured feature, meaning the surveyors indicated it through shading rather than a clean outline, suggesting the bank had begun to lose its sharp definition. A description from 1967 records an earthen bank still roughly eighty centimetres high and a diameter of around twenty-five metres, somewhat smaller than the earlier cartographic impression. Today, that bank has flattened further into a slight scarp, a low edge where the ground drops almost imperceptibly, and the interior reads simply as a circular grass-covered area of roughly the same twenty-five metre width.
What the enclosure was originally built for is not recorded. The name Lisnanuran contains the Irish element lios, which typically refers to a ringfort or enclosed settlement, and while this may or may not relate directly to the earthwork on the rise, it suggests the area was recognised in the local naming tradition as a place defined by such a feature. The enclosure now survives as a faint impression, the kind of thing that rewards a careful look at the ground rather than a glance from a distance.