Enclosure, Rathosey, Co. Sligo
Co. Sligo |
Enclosures
In the forested slopes of Rathosey, County Sligo, there is an oval enclosure that local people call the 'blood pound'.
The name alone is enough to stop you in your tracks. A pound, in the old Irish rural sense, was an enclosure where stray livestock were impounded by the authorities until their owners paid a fine to recover them. The 'blood' prefix is harder to explain with certainty, and no documentary record appears to clarify it, but such place-names often carry the residue of a dispute, a punishment, or a moment of communal grievance that never quite made it into the written record.
The enclosure itself is oval, running roughly 55 metres north to south and 40 metres east to west, enclosed by a loosely constructed stone wall about two metres wide and one metre high. The interior slopes gently downward toward the south and is now densely planted with trees and heavily overgrown, which makes reading the space difficult. Within the western half, stone footings extend from the enclosing wall and curve in two directions, suggesting either the remains of a structure or some kind of internal division; a separate arc of stones at the southern end may represent another building entirely. Remnants of a field boundary wall extend westward and then southwestward from the site, though the plantation has made these almost impossible to follow. The enclosure sits on a south-facing slope, which would have given it reasonable visibility and access in its working life, whenever that was.
The site is buried in forestry now, and the overgrowth makes the interior details easy to miss. The stone footings are low, only about 30 centimetres high, and the arc of stones at the south end is modest in scale. What a visitor is left with, largely, is the wall itself and the name, which local knowledge has preserved long after the purpose of the place became unclear.