Ceremonial enclosure, Greenmount, Co. Monaghan

Co. Monaghan |

Enclosures

Ceremonial enclosure, Greenmount, Co. Monaghan

On a low ridge in County Monaghan, a gently domed, grass-covered mound sits enclosed within an earthen bank and a shallow outer fosse, the whole arrangement measuring roughly 55 metres north to south and 48 metres east to west.

What makes this quietly odd is the label it was given on the 1834 Ordnance Survey six-inch map: 'Moat', printed in gothic lettering, applied not to the enclosure itself but to a smaller embanked feature inside it, around 20 metres in diameter. That inner feature is a bowl-barrow, a type of prehistoric burial mound defined by a rounded earthen heap within a surrounding ditch, and it sits just north-west of the centre of the larger enclosure. The outer enclosure, meanwhile, appears on the 1907 edition of the same map as a hachured ring with a second hachured feature inside it, a cartographic shorthand for earthworks that the surveyors recognised but could not easily classify.

The site occupies the north-eastern end of a small ridge, with a section of the Cor River running roughly 370 metres to the west and a small stream about 160 metres to the south-east. The earthen bank that defines the enclosure survives unevenly: on the south-east side it measures around three metres wide, standing about 1.8 metres on the exterior face but only 0.3 metres above the interior ground level, suggesting that the domed top of the hill itself makes up much of the apparent height. The outer fosse, a shallow ditch that would originally have reinforced the boundary, is still traceable on the western and northern sides but has disappeared elsewhere. There are several gaps in the bank that could function as entrances, though the one on the south-west is considered the most likely original. The site was heavily overgrown when examined in 1983, but scrub clearance carried out before 1995 brought the earthworks back into legibility.

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Pete F
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