Enclosure, Gortanure, Co. Leitrim
Co. Leitrim |
Enclosures
In a rough grazing field just north of a small forestry plantation in Gortanure, County Leitrim, something circular lies beneath the grass, invisible to anyone walking past it but legible from above.
The site exists, as far as current records are concerned, primarily as a cropmark, which is the faint differential in vegetation colour and growth that appears when buried features alter how moisture and nutrients behave in the soil above them. In dry conditions especially, the outlines of long-buried ditches or walls can surface in this way, turning an ordinary field into a kind of photographic negative of what once stood there.
What the aerial imagery reveals is a roughly circular enclosure approximately 24 metres in diameter, defined by the cropmark of a broad fosse, the fosse being a substantial ditch, here estimated at around 5 metres wide, that would originally have enclosed whatever structure or activity occupied the interior. Circular enclosures of this general type are common across Ireland and range in date from the Bronze Age through to the early medieval period, when they were often used as ringforts, serving as farmsteads for individual families or small communities. The site was reported by Jean-Charles Caillere and is visible on Digital Globe aerial imagery as well as Google Earth imagery from May 2020. At ground level, there is likely little or nothing to see, which is precisely what makes the aerial record so useful and, in a quiet way, so striking.