Enclosure, Ballincar, Co. Sligo
Co. Sligo |
Enclosures
In a field near Ballincar in County Sligo, a circle of earth barely announces itself above the surrounding pasture.
The enclosure measures fourteen metres across, its defining bank of earth and stone reaching only thirty centimetres in internal height and spreading to just over four metres in width. On the ground, it reads less as a monument than as a faint thickening of the land, a circular suggestion rather than anything architecturally assertive.
Enclosures of this kind are among the more quietly puzzling features scattered across the Irish landscape. They are generally understood as enclosed settlement sites, prehistoric or early medieval in date, where a low bank and sometimes an accompanying fosse, or external ditch, defined a domestic or agricultural space. Here, the fosse has either disappeared entirely or was never dug, and from the south-southwest around to the east, even the bank has gone, leaving only a very slight scarp, a barely perceptible change in ground level, to mark the boundary. The original entrance has been lost entirely. What does survive, tucked into the northeast quadrant of the interior, is a hut site, a remnant of what was once a small roofed structure, suggesting that somebody lived within this circle, cooking, sleeping, and going about the ordinary work of their days in a spot that now sits quietly beneath grazing livestock.