Enclosure, Skeagh, Co. Monaghan

Co. Monaghan |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Skeagh, Co. Monaghan

On the crest of a drumlin in Skeagh, a low oval hill shaped by glacial drift, sits a modern house and its garden.

Nothing about it looks out of the ordinary now, but the ground beneath it preserves the outline of something much older: a roughly D-shaped enclosure, approximately 40 metres east to west and 35 metres north to south, whose form briefly surfaced in the cartographic record before being swallowed by later development.

The enclosure appears on just one edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, the 1907 revision, where it is shown as a D-shaped field attached to the western side of a farm lane. That single appearance is significant. The D-shape, with one straight or flattened side and one curved, is a form commonly associated with early medieval enclosures in Ireland, sometimes the remains of a rath or ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead used roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Whether this particular enclosure was a settlement, a field boundary, or something else entirely is not recorded. Its presence on only one map edition suggests it had already been partially obscured or altered by the early twentieth century, and was gone from the landscape shortly afterwards. The drumlin setting would have been a practical choice for such a site, offering a naturally elevated position and good drainage on all sides.

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Pete F
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