Enclosure, Barnasrahy, Co. Sligo

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Barnasrahy, Co. Sligo

At Barnasrahy in County Sligo, there is a feature in the landscape that may, or may not, be an ancient monument.

That ambiguity is not a gap in knowledge waiting to be filled; it is, at this point, the most honest thing that can be said about it. The feature was first flagged in 1989 and classified tentatively as a possible enclosure, an enclosure being, in archaeological terms, any defined area enclosed by a bank, ditch, wall, or similar boundary, often associated with settlement, burial, or ritual activity in the prehistoric or early medieval period. But when investigators went to look, they found nothing on the ground that confirmed any archaeological character.

What aerial photography did reveal, particularly an image from 2010, is a roughly subrectangular shape of which only two sides remain clearly visible: the western side runs to approximately 37 metres and the southern to around 63.5 metres. The enclosing element, where it can be made out, appears to be a low bank. The southern side curves slightly outward in a southerly direction, which is the kind of subtle irregularity that sometimes points toward an early enclosure rather than a modern field boundary. The northern side has been absorbed into a road, and the eastern side is now occupied by a house and its garden. The feature never appeared on any edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, which were produced in Ireland from the 1830s onwards, suggesting it was already partially or fully obscured by then. It was quietly dropped from the Record of Monuments and Places in 1995, having never quite earned its place there. Whether what remains is a fragment of something genuinely ancient, or simply the boundary of an old field, remains unresolved.

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