Embanked enclosure, Keelbanada, Co. Roscommon

Co. Roscommon |

Ringforts

Embanked enclosure, Keelbanada, Co. Roscommon

In a field in Keelbanada, on a gently sloping hillside that faces south across the Roscommon landscape, the ground holds a puzzle that nobody has quite solved.

A roughly circular area of grass, measuring about 41 by 37 metres across its interior, is enclosed by an earthen bank that has been slowly swallowed by vegetation over what must be a very long period. Around that inner bank runs a fosse, the term for a deliberate earthwork ditch, and beyond the fosse sits a second, lower outer bank. Together they describe something that was once carefully constructed, with clear intention, but whose purpose and age remain unspecified.

The physical details, measured carefully, suggest a structure of some ambition. The inner bank reaches an external height of between one and 1.4 metres in most stretches, and is separated from the outer bank by a rounded fosse up to a metre deep. The whole enclosure, measured from its outermost edges, spans roughly 60 metres northwest to southeast. Whoever built this chose the south-facing slope deliberately, and the double-bank-and-fosse arrangement is a design associated with enclosed settlements or ceremonial sites from prehistoric and early medieval Ireland. What complicates any tidy interpretation is that neither bank survives on the southeastern to southwestern side, and the inner bank has gaps at four separate points, east, south, north-northwest, and north-northeast. None of these gaps can be confidently identified as the original entrance. The enclosure has, in effect, been opened up by time in so many places that its intended threshold is lost.

The site sits quietly under grass, the banks overgrown and the fosse softened to a shallow depression in most places. There are no markers, no formal access arrangements noted, and the enclosure blends into the agricultural landscape around it in the way that many such earthworks do across the Irish midlands and west, present for anyone who knows to look down at the shape of the ground rather than straight ahead.

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Pete F
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