Enclosure, Lugdoon, Co. Sligo

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Lugdoon, Co. Sligo

On a north-to-south ridge in Lugdoon, County Sligo, there is a monument that has effectively ceased to exist as a monument, and yet its outline refuses to disappear entirely.

What was once a roughly oval enclosure, somewhere in the region of 27 metres east to west and 25 metres north to south, has been levelled, absorbed by the working landscape around it, and pressed into service as a field boundary. What remains is a slightly raised D-shaped platform, its straight western edge now formed by a modern field wall running north to south. The enclosure's original geometry survives only in that subtle change in ground level and in the faint traces of a fosse, a defensive or delineating ditch, running along the northern and southern arcs at a width of roughly three to three and a half metres.

The site appears on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map from 1837, drawn as a clean oval, and again on the 1913 revision, where hachure markings indicate a more ambiguous earthwork already being swallowed by the field system around it. Between those two surveys, the western portion was incorporated into a field boundary, a process common enough in Irish agricultural history, where prehistoric and early medieval enclosures were quietly cannibalised by later landowners who found their earthen banks convenient for dividing ground. Enclosures of this general type in Ireland range from early medieval ringforts to much older prehistoric features, and without excavation it is rarely possible to assign a confident date or function. The position near the crest of a ridge suggests the site may once have commanded reasonable visibility across the surrounding terrain, though whether that mattered to whoever built it depends entirely on what it was for.

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