Enclosure, Fallaghmore, Co. Laois

Co. Laois |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Fallaghmore, Co. Laois

Beneath a working tillage field in Fallaghmore, Co. Laois, a circular ditch traces a near-complete ring that has gone largely unnoticed at ground level for centuries.

It does not announce itself. There is no mound, no ruin, no visible earthwork. The enclosure exists, for now, almost entirely as a cropmark, the kind of faint ghost that only becomes legible when viewed from above, when differential moisture in the soil causes crops to grow unevenly over buried features and reveals, if the conditions are right, the outline of something much older beneath the surface.

The feature is roughly circular, measuring approximately 35 metres north to south and 33 metres east to west, defined by a ditch somewhere between one and one and a half metres wide. A cropmark enclosure of this kind is typically the remnant of a ringfort or similar enclosed settlement, a class of monument built across Ireland from roughly the early medieval period onwards, in which a circular area was defined by one or more ditches and banks to demarcate a farmstead or place of some local significance. Only the western half of the arc is currently legible in aerial imagery; the eastern end has been cut by a later field boundary, and part of the circuit may survive in the adjacent field to the east, though it has not been confirmed. No entrance gap has been identified. The enclosure sits at around 101 metres above sea level in a gently rolling landscape that is now given over to tillage and pasture. It lies roughly 1.9 kilometres from the remains of a church and graveyard at Corbally, and about 1.43 kilometres from another early church site at Rahin, near the village of Ballylynan, a proximity that places it within a local cluster of early medieval activity that has left its marks, however faint, across this quiet stretch of Laois.

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