Embanked enclosure, Lissian, Co. Roscommon
Co. Roscommon |
Ringforts
On a north-facing slope in County Roscommon, a circular earthwork sits quietly on an east-west ridge, its southern third swallowed by scrub and overgrowth.
What makes it quietly puzzling is that, despite its considerable complexity, nobody has yet identified where you were supposed to go in. No visible entrance survives anywhere around its circumference, which at its fullest extent measures roughly 79 metres north to south and 77 metres east to west.
The enclosure is not simply a single bank thrown up around a patch of ground. It is a layered construction: a grass-covered interior roughly 44 metres across is ringed by an earthen bank, then a fosse, then a second bank, then a further fosse, and finally a third outer bank curving from the north-east around to the south-west. A fosse, to borrow the older term, is essentially a ditch, usually dug to provide the material for the bank beside it and to reinforce whatever boundary or defensive effect that bank was meant to create. The dimensions here are substantial. The inner fosse alone is between 7.3 and 7.7 metres wide at the top and between 0.9 and 1.8 metres deep externally, figures that suggest a serious investment of labour at some point in the past, even if the interior bank has been worn down to as little as ten centimetres above the surrounding ground in places. About 220 metres to the east, along the same ridge, sits a rath, the common Irish ringfort type usually associated with early medieval settlement and farming, and the proximity of the two monuments raises questions about whether they were related in use or in time, though no firm answer is currently available.
The southern portion of the site is heavily overgrown, which obscures some of the defining features and makes reading the full circuit of banks and ditches difficult on the ground. The northern arc, on the slope facing away from the ridge crest, preserves the clearest profile of the earthworks.