Embanked enclosure, Corracoggil, Co. Roscommon

Co. Roscommon |

Ringforts

Embanked enclosure, Corracoggil, Co. Roscommon

On a gentle east-facing slope in Corracoggil, County Roscommon, a roughly circular patch of grass and rushes traces the outline of something old and stubbornly unexplained.

The enclosure measures about 26 metres north to south and nearly 23 metres east to west, defined by an overgrown earthen bank that survives to a modest but legible height, between half a metre and just under a metre on its outer face, and barely raised at all on the interior. Where the bank has not held its form, it flattens to a low scarp. There is no visible fosse, the term for the enclosing ditch that typically accompanies earthworks of this kind, and no sign of an original entrance.

What makes this enclosure quietly puzzling is precisely how little it has given up. Archaeological testing carried out immediately to its west and north-west in 2004 found no related material at all. No sherds, no charcoal spreads, no post-holes or pits that might anchor it to a period or a purpose. Embanked enclosures of broadly similar form appear across Ireland in contexts ranging from early medieval farmsteads to much later pastoral enclosures, but without datable finds or structural traces, this one resists classification. It sits on the slope doing very little to explain itself.

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Pete F
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