Enclosure, Lurganboy, Co. Louth
Co. Louth |
Enclosures
In a field at Lurganboy in County Louth, there is something that cannot be seen from the ground at all.
A circular enclosure, roughly thirty metres across, exists only as a cropmark, visible in aerial photographs as a ghostly ring where soil disturbance beneath the surface causes crops above to grow differently from those surrounding them. The site itself has been levelled, its physical presence erased, yet the earth still holds the memory of whatever stood there.
The enclosure is thought to be the remains of a ringfort, the most common monument type in the Irish countryside. Ringforts were enclosed farmsteads, typically circular, defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, and used throughout the early medieval period. Thousands survive above ground across Ireland, but many more, like this one at Lurganboy, have been ploughed flat over the centuries, leaving no visible trace for a person standing nearby. The cropmark evidence here was noted by Buckley in 1987, and the site was recorded as part of a wider archaeological survey of County Louth. That a circle of approximately thirty metres diameter can still be detected from the air, long after the earthworks themselves were destroyed, speaks to just how deeply human activity can imprint itself on a landscape.