Enclosure, Carrowculleen, Co. Sligo

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Carrowculleen, Co. Sligo

On the south-facing slope of Red Hill in Carrowculleen, County Sligo, a D-shaped platform cut into the hillside marks the outline of an ancient enclosure that has, for the most part, been swallowed by a working farm.

A concrete barn and its associated cattle pens now occupy the bulk of the interior, yet the earthwork itself has not entirely disappeared. The shape of the original enclosure, roughly 41 metres north to south and between 35 and 40 metres east to west, can still be read in the land.

The enclosure takes the form of a terrace, meaning it was formed by cutting horizontally into the natural slope rather than by simply piling up a bank on level ground. On the western side, a straight field wall marks the boundary. To the north and curving around through the north-northeast, a south-facing scarp, a low step in the ground about 0.9 metres high, traces the arc of the D before fading out to the east. The southern and south-southwestern arc is considerably more pronounced, with a scarp rising to around 2 metres, suggesting that this side bore the greatest engineering effort or faced the most pressure from the slope above. The eastern side has no surviving enclosing element at all. Elsewhere in the same townland, a related field system and a second enclosure once formed part of what appears to have been a small agricultural complex, but both have since been levelled.

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Pete F
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