Enclosure, Ballinteane, Co. Sligo

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Ballinteane, Co. Sligo

On the north-eastern end of a ridge running roughly north to south through Ballinteane in County Sligo, there is an enclosure that has never appeared on any edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map.

That absence is itself quietly telling. The OS six-inch series, produced from the 1830s onward, was remarkably thorough in recording earthworks and field monuments across Ireland, so anything it consistently missed was either too subtle to catch the surveyors' attention or already too far gone to register as a distinct feature.

What survives today is a partially destroyed enclosure, its shape irregular, with a maximum dimension of around twenty metres. Enclosures of this kind are among the most common yet least understood monument types in the Irish landscape; they could represent the remains of a ringfort, a stock enclosure, or any number of settled or agricultural uses stretching back across centuries. At this site, the northern, eastern, and south-eastern sides are defined by a curving scarp, a low natural-looking edge in the ground where the raised interior drops away. The western boundary is formed by a disused field boundary running north-north-east to south-south-west, probably of relatively modern origin, while the southern side follows another modern linear field boundary. There is no surviving bank or fosse, the fosse being the external ditch that would typically accompany an earthen enclosure, and no original entrance can be identified. The monument, in other words, has been absorbed so thoroughly into the working agricultural landscape around it that its earlier character has largely dissolved into the field system.

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Pete F
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