Enclosure, Cloonakeemoge, Co. Sligo

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Cloonakeemoge, Co. Sligo

In a field of undulating pasture near Cloonakeemoge in County Sligo, there is almost nothing left to see, and that near-absence is precisely what makes this place worth thinking about.

What survives is a low, D-shaped rise in the ground, roughly sixteen metres north to south and fourteen metres east to west, the faint physical memory of an enclosure that has otherwise been erased from the landscape entirely. Enclosures of this kind, broadly circular earthworks that once defined a farmstead or other enclosed space, were once common features across the Irish countryside. Most have been lost to agriculture, and this one in Sligo is a case in point.

The site was recorded as a small circular enclosure on the 1837 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, one of the earliest systematic cartographic surveys of Ireland, which captured thousands of earthworks that were already ancient at the time of surveying. By the 1913 edition of the same map series, a field boundary running roughly north-north-west to south-south-east had come to form the eastern edge of the enclosure, suggesting the site had by then been absorbed into the working agricultural pattern of the land. At some point after that, both the enclosure itself and that field boundary were levelled, leaving only the slight D-shaped swell in the ground as evidence that anything was ever there. The shift from circular to D-shaped is telling: it suggests that the later field boundary clipped or altered the original form before everything was finally smoothed away.

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Pete F
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