Enclosure, Moher, Co. Leitrim

Co. Leitrim |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Moher, Co. Leitrim

Beneath the grass of a football pitch in Moher, Co. Leitrim, a circular enclosure roughly 22 metres across lies invisible to anyone standing on it.

It gives itself away only from the air, where a cropmark traces the line of a narrow fosse, a shallow ditch cut into the earth, about a metre wide, forming an almost perfect ring in what was formerly pasture. The ground above has long since been levelled and pressed into use for sport, but the buried archaeology persists, disclosed by the differential growth of grass over disturbed soil.

The enclosure was identified by Jean-Charles Caillere from aerial imagery, and the cropmark pattern is precisely the kind of trace that early settlement sites leave behind in the Irish landscape. Enclosed circular areas of this scale are commonly associated with ringforts, the farmsteads of early medieval Ireland, though without excavation it is impossible to assign a precise date or function to this particular feature. What sharpens the interest here is that a second enclosure, slightly larger, sits only about 17 metres to the north-east. Paired or clustered enclosures are known elsewhere in Ireland and may reflect separate but related activity at a single location, perhaps successive phases of use, or neighbouring farmsteads occupied at the same time.

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