Enclosure, Culliagh, Co. Cavan

Co. Cavan |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Culliagh, Co. Cavan

In the fields of Culliagh, a slight rise in the ground marks what was once a deliberately enclosed space, its outline still legible if you know what you are looking for.

The enclosure is roughly subcircular, measuring around 74 metres on its longer axis and 53 metres across, making it a substantial feature, comparable in scale to many of the ringforts scattered across the Irish midlands and north. A ringfort, to use the more familiar term, is typically a circular or oval area defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, used during the early medieval period as a farmstead or place of habitation, though enclosures of this kind can have earlier origins as well.

What makes this particular site quietly interesting is the way its ancient boundaries have been absorbed into the working landscape around it. The earthen bank on the south-south-west to north side has been modified and folded into an ordinary field boundary, the kind of pragmatic reuse that happened quietly across Ireland over centuries as farmers found existing earthworks useful for dividing land. The fosse, the external ditch that originally ran outside the bank, survives reasonably well on the south-west to north-west arc, but elsewhere it has been replaced by agricultural field drains. On the northern and north-north-east sides, both bank and fosse have been levelled entirely. No original entrance survives in a recognisable form. The enclosure is, in other words, a partial thing now, its geometry recoverable only in outline, its purpose and precise age unrecorded.

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Pete F
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