Enclosure, Ballymackinroe, Co. Cavan

Co. Cavan |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Ballymackinroe, Co. Cavan

Some ancient monuments announce themselves with towers or standing stones.

This one in Ballymackinroe, County Cavan, is far more reticent. Sitting at the crest of a south-facing slope, it is a low subcircular earthwork, roughly 55 metres north to south and 48 metres east to west, defined by an earth bank somewhere between five and ten metres wide. It is the kind of feature that a walker could cross without noticing, and indeed it went unrecorded until relatively recently. What makes it quietly striking is that it is most clearly readable not from the ground at all, but from aerial and satellite imagery.

An earthwork enclosure of this type is a broad category in Irish archaeology, covering everything from early medieval ringforts, which were enclosed farmsteads typically defined by a bank and ditch, to prehistoric ritual sites. Without excavation it is difficult to say with certainty what period or purpose this particular example belongs to. What is known is that the monument was first reported by Jean Charles Caillére, and that a later field bank running roughly east-north-east to west-south-west now bisects the enclosure, cutting across the earlier earthwork. That kind of intrusion is common in the Irish landscape, where post-medieval land division frequently sliced through far older features without any awareness of what lay beneath the soil.

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