Embanked enclosure, Ballindrumlea, Co. Roscommon

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Ringforts

Embanked enclosure, Ballindrumlea, Co. Roscommon

On a south-facing slope of an east-west ridge in Ballindrumlea, County Roscommon, a modest arc of earthen bank curves through the grass, the surviving fragment of what was once a circular enclosure roughly 35 metres across.

It is the kind of feature that most people would walk past without a second thought, yet the curve itself carries a quiet persistence, holding its shape across the centuries while the rest of the perimeter has long since disappeared into the surrounding landscape.

The enclosure appears on the 1837 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, already bisected at that point by a northeast-to-southwest field bank, suggesting that by the early nineteenth century it had been absorbed into the working fabric of agricultural land and its original function largely forgotten. Embanked enclosures of this type are broadly understood as enclosed spaces defined by a raised earthen boundary, sometimes associated with settlement, ritual, or stock management in early medieval or prehistoric Ireland, though without excavation it is rarely possible to say more than that. What survives here is an arc of approximately 45 metres running from south to northwest, the bank measuring around 3.5 metres wide, with an internal height of just 0.2 metres and an external height of 0.6 metres. There is no visible fosse, the term for the external ditch that typically accompanies such a bank, which either never existed, was filled in, or has simply eroded beyond recognition. The northeast-to-southwest field bank that divided the enclosure on the 1837 map remains present on the ground today, a later imposition that has outlasted almost everything else about the site.

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Pete F
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