Concentric enclosure, Gortnalamph, Co. Leitrim

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Enclosures

Concentric enclosure, Gortnalamph, Co. Leitrim

In a field at Gortnalamph in County Leitrim, an ancient enclosure lies almost entirely invisible at ground level, its existence revealed only when viewed from above.

Aerial imagery shows two concentric circular features pressed into the landscape, one inside the other, detectable not as walls or earthworks but as cropmarks, the subtle variations in grass and soil colour that betray buried archaeology beneath a living surface. A cropmark of this kind forms when the fill of a buried ditch or fosse retains more moisture than the surrounding soil, causing the vegetation directly above it to grow differently, and so to read as a contrasting line or curve when seen from the air.

The site was reported by Jean-Charles Caillere and is visible on both Digital Globe imagery from 2011 to 2013 and on Apple aerial photography. What those images show is a central circular area of roughly fifteen metres in diameter set within a larger enclosure of approximately forty-five metres across. The outer boundary is defined by the cropmark of a curving fosse running from the north-east, around through the south, and back to the west. Between the west and north, and continuing from north to north-east, the enclosure appears to be bounded instead by a linear feature that may represent a later drain rather than an original element of the monument itself. Whether the two circular elements were ever in use at the same time, or whether one belongs to a different period entirely, is not yet known. A more prosaic detail grounds the site firmly in the present: an ESB electricity pole stands on the southern perimeter, a reminder that the modern infrastructure of rural Ireland has a tendency to settle, indifferently, on top of what came before.

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