Embanked enclosure, Lisdrumneill, Co. Roscommon

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Ringforts

Embanked enclosure, Lisdrumneill, Co. Roscommon

On a gentle north-facing slope in County Roscommon, a curved remnant of earthen bank is almost all that survives of what was once a roughly circular enclosure about thirty metres across.

What makes it quietly interesting is the gap between what the historical record shows and what the land now holds. When the Ordnance Survey mapped this area in 1837, the full circle was legible enough to be marked on their six-inch map. By the 1914 edition of the same map, the cartographers could trace only a fragment of an arc. The ground has been slowly reclaiming the feature ever since.

The surviving section runs along the south-west to west of the original circuit, stretching about eighteen metres. The bank itself is modest in scale, roughly 3.8 metres wide and standing no more than 0.6 metres above the interior surface, with a slightly lower profile on the outer face. Enclosures of this general type are a common feature of the Irish landscape, typically associated with early medieval settlement, though without excavation it is difficult to assign this one a precise date or function. More intriguing is a feature the OS maps labelled simply as a "Cave" in both the 1837 and 1914 editions. This is now thought to have been a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage of the kind frequently found in association with early medieval enclosures, sometimes used for storage and sometimes as a place of refuge. If it was a souterrain, no physical trace of it remains visible at ground level today, and no independent record of its construction or contents appears to have survived.

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Pete F
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