Enclosure, Carrownacreevy, Co. Sligo

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Carrownacreevy, Co. Sligo

On a north-south ridge in the pastureland of Carrownacreevy, County Sligo, there once sat an oval enclosure large enough to have held a small settlement, measuring roughly 85 metres east to west and 65 metres north to south.

It no longer breaks the surface. The earthworks have been levelled entirely, and the only surviving evidence of the site's existence is cartographic: it appears on the 1837 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, one of the great early systematic surveys of Ireland, which captured thousands of features that would later disappear under the plough or the pressure of agricultural improvement.

What makes the site quietly arresting is its company. Within a relatively short distance, two raths survive in the landscape, one approximately 65 metres to the north and another around 130 metres to the east-northeast. A rath is a ringfort, typically a circular or oval area enclosed by an earthen bank and ditch, and they were among the most common settlement forms in early medieval Ireland. Finding two in close proximity to a now-vanished enclosure of this scale suggests that this ridge in Sligo once formed part of a more densely occupied and organised landscape than the empty pasture visible today would imply. Whether the levelled enclosure was a third rath, an earlier prehistoric feature, or something else entirely is no longer possible to determine from what remains at ground level.

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Pete F
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