Enclosure (Large), Heronstown, Co. Meath

Co. Meath |

Enclosures

Enclosure (Large), Heronstown, Co. Meath

Nobody has walked through the entrance of the large enclosure at Heronstown in County Meath, at least not in any way that modern aerial analysis can confirm, because no entrance has been found.

Visible only as a cropmark or soilmark, the kind of subtle discolouration in soil and vegetation that reveals buried or long-vanished earthworks from above, the site does not announce itself at ground level. It took satellite imagery, specifically Digital Globe photographs from 2011 to 2013 and repeated Google Earth captures between 2017 and 2022, to make it legible at all.

What those images suggest is a monument of considerable complexity and scale. At its centre sits a circular platform roughly 30 metres in diameter, separated from a substantial earthen bank by a fosse, that is, a ditch, approximately 10 metres wide. The bank itself is around 20 metres wide and is in turn ringed by an outer fosse of about 15 metres, with traces of what may be a second outer bank of similar width beyond that. The whole structure reaches a maximum external diameter of around 150 metres. It sits on a slight rise in otherwise low-lying ground, with the remnants of two old lake beds nearby to the east and north, and is sheltered within a curve of the northern foothills of the Slieve Breagh ridge, which runs roughly east-north-east to west-south-west across this part of Meath. The leading interpretation is that it may be a large barrow, a burial monument, though the absence of any detectable entrance leaves the question open. It was first brought to wider attention by Rob O'Hara, and the concentric arrangement of banks and ditches places it, if the barrow reading is correct, among the more elaborate funerary earthworks in a county already well accustomed to ancient surprises.

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Pete F
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