Enclosure, Buncrowey, Co. Sligo
Co. Sligo |
Enclosures
On a grass-covered terrace above the Easky valley in County Sligo, two adjoining stone enclosures sit side by side without any apparent opening between them.
That detail, easy to overlook on a plan, is quietly puzzling: two subrectangular spaces share a wall, yet there is no gap, no doorway, no passage connecting one to the other. Whatever the arrangement was for, movement between the two enclosures was not part of it, or at least not through that shared wall.
The larger of the two enclosures measures roughly 28 metres on its northwest to southeast axis and 23 metres across, enclosed by a drystone wall, that is, a wall built without mortar, relying entirely on the careful placement of stone, constructed here with boulder courses at its base and running to around 1.5 metres in height on the exterior face. The interior slopes gently downward from east to west, and a line of boulders with a low earthen bank on its eastern side runs from the northern wall southward through the interior, sitting approximately 3.5 metres in from the western side. Whether this internal feature was a divider, a drain, or something else is not recorded. The enclosing wall has been cut through on its western side by a later field boundary, which suggests the enclosure was already old and partly disregarded when the surrounding landscape was reorganised for agriculture at some later point. A smaller subrectangular enclosure adjoins the eastern side of the main one, with the shared wall notably thicker at its northern and southern ends than in the section between. The site sits on what the surveyor described as the riverward crest of the terrace, meaning it faces out towards the Easky river below, occupying a position that would have been conspicuous rather than hidden.