Enclosure, Lisnarawer, Co. Sligo

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Lisnarawer, Co. Sligo

On a low but deliberate rise in the rolling pastureland of Lisnarawer, County Sligo, there sits an enclosure that has been quietly absorbed into the working fabric of the fields around it.

Its boundary wall, roughly constructed and no more than half a metre high on the interior, has been folded into the existing field system so thoroughly that a casual eye might not separate monument from modern boundary at all. Yet the raised, subcircular platform it defines, stretching to a maximum of fifty-two metres across, belongs to an older order of land use entirely.

The earliest reliable record of its shape comes from the 1837 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, which captured the enclosure as a field boundary sweeping in an arc from south, through north, and round to the west-northwest. From there, a second element joins it, an almost linear bank running northeast to southwest with a slight curve at its northwestern end. For the remainder of the circuit, no enclosing feature was recorded, suggesting that part of the perimeter had already been lost or was never substantial. The low wall that survives, between one and a half and two metres wide, is typical of the kind of roughly built boundary seen around early enclosures in Ireland, structures that often served as farmsteads or as defined spaces within a settled agricultural landscape, though no specific function has been established here. Within the southeastern quadrant of the main enclosure sits a smaller, subsidiary enclosure, a detail that hints at internal organisation and raises questions about how the space was once divided and used.

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Pete F
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