Embanked enclosure, Cordevlis, Co. Monaghan
Co. Monaghan |
Ringforts
On the rounded crest of a drumlin in County Monaghan, an earthen ring sits half-swallowed by vegetation, its proportions modest but its placement deliberate.
Drumlins, those smooth whale-back ridges of glacially deposited till that ripple across the Ulster landscape in their hundreds, were favoured sites for early enclosures precisely because elevation offered both visibility and a degree of natural defence. This one, subcircular in plan and measuring roughly 33 metres west-northwest to east-southeast and 29.5 metres north-northeast to south-southwest, is defined by an earthen bank that survives best along its southern to northwestern arc.
Beyond the bank, a flat-bottomed fosse, the term for the ditch that typically accompanies such an enclosure, runs from south around the western side to the north, with a field bank sitting on its outer edge along much of that same stretch. A narrow ramp entrance, just under two metres wide at its base, opens at the south, giving the enclosure a single formalised point of access. A farm lane now skirts the southern and southwestern edges of the monument, meaning the working agricultural landscape has grown up around the site rather than erasing it. Enclosures of this kind, with their combination of internal bank, external fosse, and defined entrance, appear across Ireland from the prehistoric period through to the early medieval, though without excavation it is difficult to say with any certainty when this particular example was built or what purpose it served, whether settlement, stock management, or something more ceremonial.