Concentric enclosure in Dowth — Report the wrong picture

What is recorded here

Three widely spaced ditches circle a bluff above the River Boyne, enclosing houses, fields and a possible underground passage. The inner ditch holds more settlement debris than the middle one, suggesting people lived and worked inside the largest ring for generations. The concentric shape may have marked ownership, ritual or defence, but the buried trenches and rectangular rooms prove it was an active home as much as a monument.

Located on a bluff overlooking a NW-SE section of the River Boyne, which is c. 100m to the SW. This monument was first identified from a LiDAR Survey of the Brú na Bóinne World Heritage Site (Davis et al. 2013), and was confirmed by a magnetic gradiometry survey (12R0080) conducted during 2012. Close analysis of these results identifies three widely-spaced ditch features (ext. dims c. 123m E-W; c. 104m N-S). The innermost enclosure (diam. c. 60m) has at least one possible Man-made underground passage identified as a trench in the NW interior, while a rectangular house site is identifiable in the NE interior. Two other house-sites are in the vicinity and a line of at least three rectangular fields (dims c. 40m x c. 30m) extend NNW from the innermost ditch feature. (Ní Lionáin and Davis 2016, 134-5) Two cores were extracted (16E0347) by Clíodhna Ní Lionáin and other from the inner (Wth of top 8-9m; min. D 1.5m) and middle (Wth of top 6-7m; min. D 2.68m) ditches of this monument (excavation.ie 2016:848) for chemical analysis. The higher phosphate values of the inner fosse suggest that it has accumulated more settlement debris. Compiled by Michael Moore Date of revised upload: 9 December, 2016 Amended: 3 February 2021

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