Enclosure, Carrickane, Co. Cavan
Co. Cavan |
Enclosures
In the fields of Carrickane, on the southern end of a low ridge running roughly north to south, a circular earthwork sits almost invisibly in the grass.
About fifty metres across, its defining feature is a wide, low bank, the kind of thing that blurs easily into the surrounding landscape and can be mistaken for a natural rise or an ordinary field boundary. In fact, for practical purposes, it has become exactly that: the bank has been absorbed into a working field boundary and into the townland boundary between Carrickane and Tullylough to the south-west and north-west. Without the right tools, it would be easy to walk the perimeter and never quite register what you were circling.
The enclosure belongs to a class of roughly circular earthwork found across Ireland, typically defined by a bank and sometimes a ditch, and associated with a broad range of periods and uses, from early medieval settlement to prehistoric ritual enclosures. What makes this particular example quietly interesting is how thoroughly it has been absorbed into the modern agricultural and administrative landscape. A relict field bank, the remnant of an older boundary no longer actively maintained, cuts across the interior in an east-west direction near the southern perimeter, suggesting layers of land use laid one over another across centuries. The site was first identified and reported by Jean Charles Caillére, and subsequent LiDAR survey, a remote-sensing technique that uses laser pulses to build precise terrain models capable of revealing earthworks invisible to the naked eye, confirmed what aerial imagery from Google Earth had suggested but could not conclusively establish on its own.