Enclosure, Caltragh, Co. Sligo

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Caltragh, Co. Sligo

On the edge of a steep eastward-facing slope above the Owenykeevan River in County Sligo, there is a roughly circular earthwork that nobody has quite been able to explain.

It measures approximately fifteen metres east to west and fourteen metres north to south, defined by a low bank with a rounded crest and gently concave slopes. The whole thing sits beneath a blanket of regenerating cutaway bog, which is bog that has been commercially harvested and is slowly reasserting itself, and that covering means the feature's true character remains, officially, unknown.

The site first came to attention in 1989, when it was added to the Sites and Monuments Record on the strength of a circular feature spotted in an aerial photograph. That kind of desk-based identification is a routine part of how Ireland's archaeological landscape gets mapped; cropmarks, shadows, and tonal differences in aerial imagery regularly reveal things invisible at ground level. When investigators visited in 1993, however, the picture became murkier rather than clearer. The fieldwork suggested the feature might simply be the remains of a quarry rather than any kind of enclosure in the archaeological sense, and on that basis it was dropped from the Record of Monuments and Places in 1995. It occupies that slightly uncomfortable category of place that was once considered significant, then reconsidered, and now sits in a kind of formal limbo, covered in bog and declining to offer any further clues.

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Pete F
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