Embanked enclosure, Corry, Co. Roscommon
Co. Roscommon |
Ringforts
On a south-facing drumlin slope in County Roscommon, there is a circular earthwork that has no visible entrance.
Whatever its original purpose, the way in and out has either vanished beneath centuries of accumulated soil and vegetation or was never the kind of gap a modern eye would easily recognise. That absence gives the site a quietly sealed quality, as though it has simply declined to explain itself.
The enclosure is roughly 26 metres across, defined on its northern and western sides by an overgrown earthen bank around three and a half metres wide, and on its southern and western sides by a natural-looking scarp that drops to a maximum of about one and a half metres at the south-west. An outer fosse, the term for a ditch dug as part of a defensive or boundary arrangement, runs along the north and east, surviving to a depth of up to about 0.8 metres. The bank itself is low, mostly between 0.2 and 0.8 metres in height internally, with the higher ground to the north-east where the slope rises. Earthworks of this kind are broadly related to the rath tradition, the ringforts that served as enclosed farmsteads across early medieval Ireland, though embanked enclosures can be difficult to date precisely and their function is not always straightforward. Notably, a rath sits roughly a hundred metres to the north-east, suggesting that this part of the drumlin was a considered and occupied landscape rather than an isolated anomaly.