Enclosure, Cornafulla, Co. Roscommon

Co. Roscommon |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Cornafulla, Co. Roscommon

In a level stretch of pasture in County Roscommon, a near-perfect circle roughly 35 metres across sits quietly in the grass, its edges marked by nothing more dramatic than a low scarp, a slight drop in the ground that traces the line of something much older beneath the surface.

It is the kind of feature that most people would walk across without a second thought, yet from above, the geometry is unmistakable.

Circular enclosures of this type are a familiar, if still not fully understood, presence across the Irish midlands. They may represent the remains of a ringfort, a farmstead enclosed by an earthen bank during the early medieval period, or they may belong to an earlier tradition entirely. Without excavation, the date and function of any individual example remain open questions. What is recorded here is the basic shape, noted by Jean-Charles Caillere and visible on aerial imagery, with a later field boundary cutting north-north-east to south-south-west across the western edge, an intrusion that suggests the enclosure had already lost whatever meaning it once held by the time the surrounding land was reorganised into the field pattern that persists today.

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Pete F
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