Enclosure, Skreen More, Co. Sligo
Co. Sligo |
Enclosures
On a limestone terrace cut into the northern slopes of Red Hill in County Sligo, a roughly circular stone enclosure sits so quietly in the grass that it is easy to mistake for a natural feature.
The wall, never more than thirty centimetres high and between one and one and a half metres wide, reads today as a low, sod-covered stony rise. Only where the facing stones break the surface can you make out that this is a constructed thing, with a deliberate inner and outer skin of stone. An enclosure of this kind, a defined area set apart from the surrounding land by a stone bank or wall, was a common feature of the Irish countryside across many centuries, used variously for settlement, agriculture, or purposes that are no longer easy to read from the ground alone.
The terrace itself does some of the structural work. Along the north-west to north-east arc, the wall more or less disappears into the natural drop at the terrace edge, so the enclosure uses the landscape rather than simply sitting on top of it. The subcircular interior measures roughly 48 metres north to south and 52.5 metres east to west, occupying the full width of the terrace at its eastern end. About thirty metres to the south-east, a spring well rises from a natural depression in the rock outcrop, the kind of water source that would have made a site like this genuinely liveable or at least practically useful. To the north, the ground falls away and the view opens across grassland all the way to the sea, with Benbulbin to the north-east and Knocknarea to the north forming the skyline.