Enclosure, Glen, Co. Sligo

Co. Sligo |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Glen, Co. Sligo

On a hilltop in Glen, County Sligo, there is an ancient enclosure that has effectively sealed itself off from the world.

Its interior has never been planted with conifers, yet that has done nothing to make it accessible; a dense, impenetrable thicket of blackthorn bushes and brambles fills the space entirely, as though the site has taken its own steps against investigation. The surrounding commercial forestry presses in to within a few metres of the perimeter, completing the sense of a place that does not particularly want to be looked at.

What survives is a raised oval earthwork, roughly 25 metres along its north-west to south-east axis and about 20 metres across. The earthen bank defining it is nearly four metres wide, rising about half a metre above the interior and a more substantial 1.5 metres on the outer face, which suggests this was once a reasonably imposing structure on its hilltop position. Enclosures of this kind are scattered across the Irish landscape and likely served a range of purposes over many centuries, from settlement and farming to more ceremonial uses, though their exact function on any given site is rarely easy to pin down. This one retains a few details worth noting: the bank is faced with stone and has been incorporated into a later field boundary running north-west to south-east, meaning the old earthwork was pressed into agricultural service at some point, its prehistoric or early medieval origins repurposed by whoever was farming the hill. A gap of around two metres in the southern stretch of the bank may mark an original entrance, a feature common to enclosures of this type.

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Pete F
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