Embanked enclosure, Dunraymond, Co. Monaghan
Co. Monaghan |
Ringforts
On the crown of a drumlin in County Monaghan, one of those smooth, whale-backed hills left behind by retreating glaciers, sits the remnant of a large circular enclosure whose original purpose remains unidentified.
What makes it quietly unsettling is the progressive nature of its disappearance: recorded in reasonable detail in 1968, further worn down and altered by farm buildings eating into its eastern side, and then, by 2000, stripped of its inner bank entirely.
When the site was described in 1968, it consisted of two concentric rings. The inner was a circular grass-covered area roughly 57 metres across, defined by a slight earthen bank or scarp. Separating this from the outer bank was a fosse, a defensive or boundary ditch, and a berm, the flat strip of ground between the two. The outer bank, measuring roughly 78 metres across, was already in reduced condition by the time it was formally recorded, surviving mainly as a scarp and a hedge line on the western side, with a fosse at its base and a further field bank beyond. The measurements taken at the west give a sense of what once existed: the outer bank still stood 2.8 metres high in places, and the fosse retained a depth of nearly a metre. No entrance was identified, which is itself notable for an enclosure of this scale, and the eastern portion had already been destroyed by old farm buildings. By 2000, the inner bank had been removed altogether, leaving only the degraded outer circuit and its associated earthworks to indicate that something substantial once occupied this hilltop.