Earthwork, Mullaghardagh, Co. Roscommon

Co. Roscommon |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Earthwork, Mullaghardagh, Co. Roscommon

In a field of mixed tillage and pasture in County Roscommon, something circular lies buried just below the surface.

It cannot be seen by walking the ground; it only reveals itself from above, as a soilmark on aerial imagery, a ghostly disc roughly fifty metres across pressed into the earth like an old impression in wax. What it actually is remains uncertain. The soilmark is thought to represent the possible remains of an earthwork, but the qualification is deliberate. Archaeology from the air rarely offers clean answers.

What makes the site stranger still is the wider pattern it sits within. The circular feature appears to occupy the western half of a much larger rectangular enclosure, estimated at around a hundred metres long and seventy metres wide, oriented roughly east-northeast to west-southwest. That enclosure is itself invisible at ground level, defined only by the cropmarks of two parallel fosses, the term for the ditches that would once have bounded such a space. Cropmarks form when buried features affect how vegetation grows above them, with ditches often producing lusher, darker growth and compacted surfaces doing the opposite. Jean-Charles Caillere first reported the site, and the aerial image that captures it dates from April 2015. A ringfort, a type of circular enclosed farmstead common across early medieval Ireland, lies approximately three hundred and eighty metres to the west-southwest, raising the question of whether these features were ever part of the same landscape of occupation, or simply neighbours across the centuries.

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