Enclosure, Roo, Co. Cavan
Co. Cavan |
Enclosures
On the Ordnance Survey maps of 1836 and 1876, a small circle appears in the townland of Roo in County Cavan, marked as a tree-ring.
That annotation almost certainly reflects what the surveyors saw at the time: a ring of mature trees growing along the perimeter of something older, the vegetation tracing an outline that the ground itself had largely ceased to show. Beneath those trees, and still faintly legible today, is the remnant of a prehistoric or early medieval enclosure, the kind of circular settled space that once defined domestic and perhaps defensive life across the Irish landscape.
What survives is a raised circular area of roughly 34 metres in internal diameter, enclosed by a low bank of earth and stone. That bank is now thought to represent the collapsed or denuded base of what was once a stone rampart, the outer wall of an enclosure that would have stood considerably higher when in use. The site has been largely levelled over time, and no original entrance is any longer recognisable. Enclosures of this type, sometimes called ringforts or raths depending on their construction, were the most common settlement form in early medieval Ireland, typically housing a farming family and their livestock within a defended boundary. A stone-walled version, known as a cashel, suggests a degree of local prosperity or access to good building material. Without excavation it is impossible to say precisely when this one was built or occupied, but the form and scale are consistent with early medieval use, broadly the period from around the fifth to the twelfth century.