Embanked enclosure, Tibohine, Co. Roscommon

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Ringforts

Embanked enclosure, Tibohine, Co. Roscommon

On the crest of a ridge running west-northwest to east-southeast in County Roscommon, there is an earthwork that raises an immediate question: how did anyone get in?

The roughly oval enclosure, measuring just over forty-two metres north to south and thirty-eight metres east to west, is ringed by an earthen bank and an outer fosse, the shallow ditch that typically accompanies such constructions, yet no entrance gap has been identified anywhere along its circuit. The bank survives in reasonably complete condition despite centuries of growth and weathering, and in places on the eastern side some of the original stone facing is still visible along its inner edge. The fosse is more pronounced on the southern and eastern sides, becoming almost imperceptibly shallow as it curves around to the northwest.

Enclosures of this general type are scattered across the Irish countryside and are often difficult to date without excavation. Some belong to the early medieval period and served as farmsteads or enclosures for livestock; others may be prehistoric in origin. What is clear at Tibohine is that the site had a later life as ordinary agricultural land. The interior is now crossed by the remnants of a field wall and hedge running roughly north to south, features that belong to a much later phase of land division and that gradually obscured whatever the enclosure once contained. This layering of different uses across the same ground is common in the Irish landscape, where earlier earthworks were simply absorbed into the working fabric of farms without being demolished outright.

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Pete F
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