Enclosure, Tullyneeny, Co. Roscommon

Co. Roscommon |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Tullyneeny, Co. Roscommon

Beneath the improved pasture of Tullyneeny, in County Roscommon, lies a circular enclosure that has left almost no trace on the surface of the land.

The only reason anyone knows it is there at all is a cropmark, a subtle variation in vegetation colour and growth that appears in aerial imagery when conditions are right, betraying the outline of a buried feature roughly 60 metres in diameter.

Cropmarks form when buried ditches or foundations affect how plants above them grow, particularly during dry summers when differences in soil moisture become pronounced. Reported by Jean-Charles Caillere and identified in Google Earth imagery captured on 16 March 2011, this circular enclosure sits in a landscape that was clearly significant to earlier inhabitants. Two ringforts, the most common early medieval monument type in Ireland, typically consisting of an earthen bank enclosing a farmstead or dwelling, lie within close range: one approximately 140 metres to the northwest, another around 300 metres to the northeast. The proximity of these three features to one another suggests this part of Roscommon was a well-settled territory, with the as-yet-unclassified enclosure potentially representing an earlier, later, or functionally different kind of activity within the same general area.

What the enclosure actually was, whether a ceremonial site, a settlement, or something else entirely, remains unknown without excavation. For now it persists only as a faint signal read from the air, surrounded by fields that give nothing away.

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