Enclosure, Carranduff, Co. Sligo

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Carranduff, Co. Sligo

In a flat stretch of pasture beside the abandoned hamlet of Carranduff in County Sligo, there is a site that leaves nothing for the eye to find.

No earthwork rises from the ground, no stone marks the perimeter, and a visitor walking across the field would have no reason to pause. Yet the maps tell a different story, and so does local memory.

By the time the Ordnance Survey produced its revised six-inch maps in 1913, an oval or sub-rectangular enclosure was clearly depicted at this location, measuring roughly 22 metres on its northwest to southeast axis and about 11 metres across. That same feature is entirely absent from the 1837 edition of the same survey, which raises the question of whether the structure was simply missed by the earlier surveyors, or whether it came into use sometime between those two dates. Locally, the site was known as the cattle pound, a term that points to a very practical function. A pound was an enclosure, typically maintained by a parish or landowner, where stray or impounded livestock were held until their owner paid a fine to reclaim them. The institution was a mundane but loaded one, tied to questions of common land, grazing rights, and the power of local landlords over smallholders. That this particular pound stood beside what is now a deserted settlement adds a quiet melancholy to an otherwise unremarkable patch of ground. About 50 metres to the southeast, a separate earthwork survives, though the relationship between the two features is not recorded.

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Pete F
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