Enclosure, Doonflin, Co. Sligo

Co. Sligo |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Doonflin, Co. Sligo

At Doonflin in County Sligo, a low stony bank curves across the landscape in a shape that raises more questions than it answers.

Roughly D-shaped as it survives today, it may once have been circular, with a diameter of somewhere between 85 and 90 metres. It traces the lower contours of a natural rise, and while its south-western to northern arc can still be read as a degraded stony ridge about two metres wide, its north-eastern side has been worn down to a simple scarp, standing perhaps a metre high at its south-eastern end. The southern stretch is gone entirely, cut through by the N59 road.

At the centre of the enclosure, on the summit of that same natural elevation, sits a cashel, a type of stone-walled ringfort associated with early medieval settlement and farming life in Ireland. The gap between the cashel and the outer bank runs to roughly 20 to 25 metres and is divided up by transverse walls running across it. What those walls once organised, whether livestock, activity areas, or something else, is unclear. So too is the relationship between the cashel and the enclosure surrounding it. The two structures may be broadly contemporary, with the outer bank serving as an additional ring of enclosure around the cashel, a not uncommon arrangement in early medieval Ireland. On the other hand, the outer enclosure may be a later feature, belonging to a field system that absorbed the cashel long after it had ceased to function as a settlement. Aerial photography has been the principal means of reading the full extent of what survives.

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Pete F
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