Embanked enclosure, Lissacurkia, Co. Roscommon

Co. Roscommon |

Ringforts

Embanked enclosure, Lissacurkia, Co. Roscommon

In the landscape of County Roscommon, on a southward-facing slope of a ridge running roughly southeast to northwest, an oval earthwork sits quietly beneath decades of overgrowth, its origins unannounced and its entrance entirely absent.

That last detail is the strangest thing about it. Most enclosures of this kind, whether ringforts used as farmsteads or ceremonial enclosures of earlier prehistoric periods, preserve at least a gap or causeway where people once passed through. Here, no such feature survives, or perhaps none ever existed.

The enclosure measures roughly 43.6 metres east to west and 32.8 metres north to south, making it a substantial oval by any measure. Its boundary is not a single wall but a layered construction: an inner earthen bank, still standing between half a metre and just over a metre high depending on which side you measure from, is separated from a stony outer bank by a rounded fosse, the term for a ditch dug as part of a defensive or boundary arrangement. That fosse runs up to a metre deep and nearly six and a half metres wide at its top, narrowing toward its base, giving the whole circuit a pronounced, deliberate profile even in its current overgrown state. The outer stony bank has been partially absorbed into a later field boundary, which is common enough in the Irish countryside, where farmers have long pressed older earthworks into service as convenient ready-made walls. What is less common is an enclosure of this scale and complexity leaving so little clue about its purpose or the period in which it was built.

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Pete F
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