Embanked enclosure, Cloonarragh, Co. Roscommon

The enclosure at Cloonarragh sits on the crest of a ridge running northwest to southeast, and its most striking quality is precisely what it lacks: no ditch, no obvious entrance, no clear indication of what it once contained or excluded.

The feature is a grass-covered circular area roughly 41 metres across, defined by a low earthen bank that varies in width from around three to four and a half metres. On its northwestern, eastern, and southern sides the bank survives with a little more presence, rising between ten and forty centimetres above the interior and around twenty centimetres on the outside. Elsewhere it has eroded to little more than a scarp, a slight sloping edge where the ground falls away. An embanked enclosure of this kind is a broad category in Irish field archaeology, used to describe roughly circular earthworks defined by a bank rather than a bank-and-ditch combination. That absence of a fosse, the external ditch that normally accompanies a ringfort, is part of what makes Cloonarragh difficult to interpret. Without it, and without a legible original entrance, the site resists easy classification. It could be a settlement enclosure, a stock enclosure, or something ritual in function; the ridge-top position suits several possibilities. The drumlin landscape it occupies is itself a product of glacial action, those rounded hills of boulder clay left behind by retreating ice sheets, and such ridges were frequently chosen for enclosures because they offered natural drainage and visibility across the surrounding terrain.