Enclosure, Cornaveagh, Co. Roscommon
Co. Roscommon |
Enclosures
In a pasture field at Cornaveagh in County Roscommon, a circular enclosure sits quietly on a gentle, south-west-facing slope, largely invisible to anyone walking past.
It was not excavated or surveyed on the ground in any conventional sense; it was spotted from the air. Aerial imagery captured in March 2020 reveals the site as a cropmark, the kind of faint discolouration in vegetation that betrays buried or barely-visible features beneath the surface. The enclosure has an estimated internal diameter of around 35 metres, with traces of a possible fosse, essentially a defensive or boundary ditch, detectable outside the inner scarp, bringing the estimated external diameter to roughly 50 metres.
The site was reported by Jean-Charles Caillere, and what the imagery shows fits a pattern well-known in Irish archaeology: a roughly circular enclosed space defined by a scarp and ditch, consistent with the kind of ringfort or related enclosure that once served as a farmstead or settlement during the early medieval period, though without excavation the precise date and function remain open questions. One detail that complicates the picture is a later field boundary running north-west to south-east across the monument, cutting through it to the south-west of centre. That boundary is clearly a later addition, but its presence means the enclosure has been quietly modified by centuries of agricultural use, its outline absorbed into the working landscape around it.