Enclosure, Tullyval, Co. Roscommon

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Tullyval, Co. Roscommon

In the townland of Tullyval in County Roscommon, a small circular enclosure once sat quietly on a gentle slope, recorded on a map, surveyed in some detail, and then erased from the landscape entirely before anyone could visit it again.

By 2005, aerial photographs confirmed it was gone. What survives now is only the description: a roughly circular earthen bank, about eleven metres across east to west and ten metres north to south, with traces of inner and outer facing stones still visible along the northern and south-eastern arc when it was last examined. The bank itself was modest, barely a third of a metre high on the outside, with almost no internal height to speak of. There was no visible fosse, the defensive ditch that typically accompanies enclosures of this kind, and no discernible entrance.

The enclosure appeared on the 1914 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, which places it among features recorded during that particular revision of the Irish landscape, though whether it was ancient or relatively recent in origin is not stated. Its form, a low earthen ring with some stone facing, is consistent with the kind of small enclosure that occurs widely across the Irish midlands and west, sometimes associated with early medieval settlement, sometimes with stock management, and sometimes difficult to assign to any period at all without excavation. What makes Tullyval quietly notable is its context: a related earthwork lay roughly fifty metres to the north-west, and a rath, a type of circular earthen enclosure commonly associated with early medieval farmsteads, stood about a hundred and seventy metres to the south-west. The enclosure sat on flat ground on a south-east facing slope, with a stream running roughly north-east to south-west about sixty metres away to the south-east, a detail that suggests the site was chosen with some care for its relationship to water and drainage.

There is nothing to see at Tullyval now. The feature was removed sometime before 2005, absorbed back into the agricultural land around it. It persists only in the 1914 map, in the measurements taken during survey, and in the small fact that it once existed alongside at least two other earthworks in the same quiet corner of Roscommon.

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Pete F
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