Embanked enclosure, Lissananny, Co. Roscommon

Co. Roscommon |

Ringforts

Embanked enclosure, Lissananny, Co. Roscommon

On a gentle south-east-facing slope at Lissananny in County Roscommon, a low D-shaped platform sits quietly in the field pattern, its edges partly obscured by hedgerow and stone wall.

What makes it awkward to interpret is precisely what makes it interesting: the shape does not quite match the record. When the Ordnance Survey mapped this part of Connacht in 1837, their six-inch sheet recorded a circular embanked enclosure with an external diameter of roughly forty metres. What survives on the ground today is something rather different, a raised grass-covered area measuring approximately thirty-two metres north to south and just over twenty metres east to west, its outline defined by a scarp and hedge running north-east to south-south-west and a curving field wall to the north. The western side of the perimeter has been quarried away to a depth of around two metres, removing whatever profile once existed there.

Embanked enclosures of this general type are a recurring feature of the Irish landscape, typically interpreted as enclosed settlements or farmsteads of early medieval date, though they can also reflect later agricultural or defensive use. A surrounding fosse, the ditch that would normally accompany an earthen bank, would help narrow the identification, but none is visible here. Nor is there any identifiable original entrance. The quarrying that ate into the western arc has not only altered the plan but removed evidence that might otherwise have clarified the monument's character and age. What the 1837 surveyors saw, and drew as a neat circle, was already a modified version of something older; what remains now is a further stage of that same slow dismantling.

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Pete F
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