Enclosure, Grange, Co. Sligo
Co. Sligo |
Enclosures
In the townland of Grange in County Sligo, there is a recorded archaeological enclosure whose details remain, for now, almost entirely undisclosed in the public record.
It sits in a county already dense with prehistoric and early medieval remains, from the megalithic cemetery at Carrowmore to the passage tomb on Knocknarea, and yet this particular site has not yet had its formal documentation made publicly available. An enclosure, in archaeological terms, is a broad category: it might describe a ringfort used as a farmstead in the early medieval period, a Bronze Age ceremonial space defined by a ditch and bank, or any number of other bounded features that human hands shaped into the landscape over thousands of years. What category this one belongs to, and what survives of it on the ground today, remains a matter the available sources cannot yet answer.
Grange itself is a townland with strong archaeological associations, lying close to the Carrowmore megalithic complex, one of the largest concentrations of passage tombs in Ireland, and within a wider landscape that has been farmed, settled, and ceremonially marked since the Neolithic period. That an enclosure should be recorded here is entirely plausible given the density of activity the area has yielded elsewhere, but without published descriptive detail, its age, condition, and character cannot be stated with any confidence.