They are easy to overlook, these gentle ridges and linear humps in the grass, yet they carry within them two quite different possible histories, and perhaps both are partially true.

The earthworks may represent the remnants of orchards or enclosed fields that once belonged to the Bishop of Clonmacnoise. If so, they pre-date the castle and were damaged, perhaps obliterated in places, when the Anglo-Norman fortification was constructed nearby. That detail alone is quietly significant: it suggests an organised, cultivated ecclesiastical landscape that the arrival of Norman power disrupted in a very physical, soil-turning way. The alternative reading is that the boundaries belong to a deserted settlement that grew up in association with the castle itself, the kind of small dependent community that often clustered around medieval fortifications and then vanished, leaving only these low signatures in the earth. A bawn, to use one related term from the period, was a walled enclosure associated with a castle or tower house, and field systems of this kind sometimes served analogous functions, corralling livestock or kitchen gardens close to the fortification. At Clonmacnoise, the two possibilities sit unresolved alongside each other, which gives the earthworks an unusual quality: they are evidence of something, but the something remains genuinely open.