Enclosure, Barroe, Co. Sligo

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Barroe, Co. Sligo

On a high limestone ridge above the eastern shore of Lough Arrow in County Sligo, there is a circular earthwork that nobody thought to record on a map until aerial photography revealed it.

It does not appear on any edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, the standard reference for Irish field monuments of this kind, which makes its existence a small puzzle. It measures twenty-one metres across in both directions, perfectly circular, and were you to walk across it without knowing what to look for, you might easily dismiss it as a trick of the ground.

The enclosure, located in pasture on a terrace of the ridge, is defined by the low remnants of a bank, an earthen boundary that would once have enclosed a defined interior space. Such enclosures are a broad category in Irish archaeology, ranging from early medieval ringforts used as farmsteads to ceremonial or burial sites of much greater antiquity; without excavation, the function of this particular example remains open. The bank survives to a width of about 1.4 metres and rises only 0.2 to 0.3 metres above the surrounding ground, making it extremely subtle. It is clearest along the eastern and south-eastern arc, where it reads as a low grass-covered rise. On the western side, it effectively disappears, merging with the naturally rising ground. A north-to-south seam of exposed limestone bedrock along the western edge gives the interior a gently concave profile, a slight bowl shape that owes as much to geology as to human construction. To the south-west, the ridge falls away steeply for roughly 400 metres in a series of rocky terraces before levelling out at the lake shore below.

The site was brought to the attention of the National Monuments Service by Andrew Goodison, and its survival, unmarked and unrecorded for so long, is in large part due to the limestone terrain that has kept the ground from being significantly altered. Visitors approaching from the north-east would find the gradient relatively gentle, while the south-western approach involves negotiating those descending rocky terraces with Lough Arrow laid out below. The bank is easiest to read from the eastern side, where the ground beyond the enclosure drops slightly and the low rise of the earthwork is just legible against the open pasture.

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