Earthwork, Crossna, Co. Roscommon

Co. Roscommon |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Earthwork, Crossna, Co. Roscommon

On a south-west-facing slope at Crossna in County Roscommon, a roughly D-shaped earthwork lies entirely invisible to anyone walking across it.

The pasture gives nothing away. The feature measures approximately 25 metres on its north-east to south-west axis and around 20 metres across, which makes it a reasonably substantial enclosure, yet nothing at ground level announces its presence.

What we know of it comes almost entirely from cartographic evidence. The 1837 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, one of the most detailed early surveys of the Irish landscape, recorded the feature clearly enough to preserve its outline and rough dimensions. That it has since disappeared from view, absorbed into farmland, is not unusual for earthworks of this kind. Slight banks and ditches that were already low when the surveyors recorded them have a tendency to be levelled by generations of grazing and occasional cultivation. Roughly 35 metres to the east lies a cashel, a type of stone-walled enclosure associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, which raises the question of whether the two features were ever related in function or date. No excavation appears to have resolved that question, and without further investigation the earthwork remains a shape on an old map, its origin and purpose unconfirmed.

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Pete F
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