Enclosure, Carrownaboll, Co. Sligo
Co. Sligo |
Enclosures
Some ancient monuments announce themselves with drama; others are disappearing quietly into the fields.
At Carrownaboll in County Sligo, what was once a subcircular enclosure defined by a low earthen bank is now barely legible in the landscape. The monument sits on a gentle south-facing slope in pasture, the kind of unremarkable agricultural setting that has swallowed countless prehistoric and early medieval features across Ireland. Enclosures of this type, essentially a defined area enclosed by a raised bank of earth, may have served any number of purposes depending on their period, from settlement and farmstead boundaries to ritual or funerary use, though without excavation it is rarely possible to say which.
When a fieldworker visited the site in 1993, the enclosure was still measurable: roughly 19.3 metres east to west and 15.3 metres north to south, a modest but coherent form preserved as a raised area in the ground. Even then, it was a low and unassuming feature. Since that survey, the bank has been levelled further, and only fragmentary traces of the monument remain identifiable. What the 1993 visit captured, in effect, was something close to its last readable moment as an upstanding structure.