Embanked enclosure, Lisdrumneill, Co. Roscommon

Co. Roscommon |

Ringforts

Embanked enclosure, Lisdrumneill, Co. Roscommon

On a steep north-facing slope in County Roscommon, a grass-covered oval earthwork sits quietly in the landscape, its concentric banks and surrounding ditch still legible beneath the turf despite centuries of use, modification, and partial burial.

The enclosure measures roughly 55 metres east to west and just under 42 metres north to south, dimensions that place it firmly in the range of the ringfort tradition, those enclosed farmsteads that were once the most common settlement form across early medieval Ireland. What makes this particular example worth pausing over is its layered complexity: an inner earthen bank, a complete rounded fosse (a ditch, in this case shallow but continuous), and the remains of an outer bank that survives only along the south-south-west to north-north-west arc. Two entrances pierce the inner bank, one to the south-west at just over a metre wide, and a broader opening to the north-east at two metres.

Beneath the southern part of the inner bank lies a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage typically associated with storage or refuge in early medieval settlements, its presence suggesting this was once a functioning domestic site of some significance. When Gannon recorded the monument in 1972, a hut-site was still identifiable at the centre of the enclosure, but that feature has since disappeared from view, absorbed back into the grass. The western bank has fared no better against the pressures of working farmland: a field wall now overlies part of the western perimeter, and a farm track cuts across the whole monument on a north-north-east to south-south-west alignment, slicing through what was once a carefully bounded space.

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