Enclosure, Killeenduff, Co. Sligo
Co. Sligo |
Enclosures
On a gently sloping field in Killeenduff, County Sligo, there is a monument that exists now only on paper.
The land looks like ordinary pasture, rolling quietly westward, with nothing to suggest that anything was ever here. Yet a century-old map tells a different story.
The 1913 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded a semi-circular enclosure on this slight west-facing slope, measuring roughly 20 metres east to west and 10 metres north to south, with an east-west field boundary forming its southern edge. Enclosures of this kind are among the most common archaeological monument types in Ireland, typically serving as the boundaries of early medieval farmsteads, though some have older or ritual origins. This one, whatever its original purpose, has since been levelled entirely. There is no surface trace of any enclosing element, no bank, no ditch, no depression in the grass. The field boundary that once helped define it may itself have shifted or disappeared. What survives is essentially a cartographic ghost, a shape on a map made when the feature was presumably still legible on the ground, if only faintly.