Crannog, Avalreagh, Co. Monaghan
Co. Monaghan |
Settlement Sites
At Avalreagh in County Monaghan, a lake that once held an island no longer exists.
The water is gone, the island is gone, and what remains is a low, overgrown mound rising barely thirty centimetres from the surrounding bog. That mound, roughly fifteen metres across, is almost certainly what was once a crannog, an artificial or partially artificial island built in a lake, typically during the early medieval period, and used as a defensible dwelling place. The lake itself was small and subrectangular, stretching no more than about 230 metres at its longest and somewhere between 110 and 160 metres wide. It had no recorded name.
The only cartographic evidence for what this place looked like in its earlier state comes from the 1834 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, which shows a small island of around five metres in diameter sitting near the north-western shore of that unnamed lake. By the time archaeologists came to describe the site, the lake had dried up entirely, leaving the former island stranded in bog. The circular cairn that marks the spot now shows no structural features at the surface, its original form obscured beneath vegetation and time. Without excavation, the details of its construction and occupation remain unknown, though the form and setting are consistent with the crannog tradition found widely across Ireland and Scotland.