Enclosure, Muckduff, Co. Sligo
Co. Sligo |
Enclosures
On the eastern edge of a low ridge in the rolling pastureland of Muckduff in County Sligo, there is a circular earthwork that has almost erased itself from the landscape.
Twenty-five metres across from north to south, it survives now only as a gentle swelling in the ground, a barely perceptible rise in the grass that most walkers would cross without a second thought.
By 1913, when the Ordnance Survey produced its six-inch map of the area, the feature was still legible enough to be recorded with hachures, the short radiating lines cartographers used to indicate an upstanding earthen bank or mound. At some point after that, the enclosure was levelled, most likely through agricultural improvement, and the boundary that once defined it was reduced to this faint topographical trace. Enclosures of this kind, roughly circular areas enclosed by an earthen bank and ditch, are among the most common archaeological monument types in Ireland, ranging in date from the Bronze Age through to the early medieval period. They served a variety of purposes, from farmstead enclosures to ceremonial sites, and their ubiquity across the Irish countryside speaks to centuries of settled, organised land use. This particular example at Muckduff leaves too little above ground to say with confidence what function it once served, which in its own way makes the survival of even this faint impression all the more worth noting.