Embanked enclosure, Creevy, Co. Roscommon
Co. Roscommon |
Ritual/Ceremonial
Something circular and deliberate once occupied the ground at Creevy, in County Roscommon, though you would never know it standing there today.
A roughly 20-metre-wide embanked enclosure, a ring defined by raised earthen banks, appears clearly on Ordnance Survey maps from both 1837 and 1914, sitting on the north side of an east-west lane across a level stretch of land. Since then, land reclamation and pasture improvement have erased whatever surface trace remained, and the feature is now entirely invisible at ground level.
Embanked enclosures of this kind are scattered across the Irish countryside and can serve several different functions depending on their period and context, ranging from early medieval settlement enclosures to later stock management features. The Creevy example offers little in the way of surviving physical evidence to pin it down further. What is notable is the persistence of the feature across two separate editions of the OS six-inch mapping, separated by nearly eight decades, suggesting that something legible was still present in the landscape well into the early twentieth century before eventually disappearing beneath improved agricultural ground.