Enclosure, Charleville Demesne, Co. Offaly
Co. Offaly |
Enclosures
Within the grounds of Charleville Demesne in County Offaly, a circular enclosure exists on paper that no longer exists in the ground, or at least not in any form the eye can detect.
It appears on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, the great mid-nineteenth-century cartographic effort that recorded Ireland townland by townland, capturing field boundaries, ruins, and earthworks that were already beginning to disappear. By the time anyone looked again, the enclosure had vanished from the landscape entirely, leaving only its outline on that early survey sheet.
Circular enclosures of this kind are common across Ireland, and their origins are various. Some are the remains of ringforts, the enclosed farmsteads of early medieval Ireland; others may be far older, associated with Bronze Age or Iron Age activity. Without surface remains, it is impossible to say with any confidence what this particular feature was, when it was built, or who used it. What the map tells us is simply that something was there, round in plan and distinct enough to be worth recording, sometime before the first edition sheets were published. Whether it was levelled deliberately during landscaping of the demesne, or whether it simply eroded and faded over the intervening generations, is not known.

