Embanked enclosure, Lisnalurg, Co. Sligo
Co. Sligo |
Enclosures
At Lisnalurg in County Sligo, there is an earthwork that rewards a second look.
From a distance it might read as ordinary agricultural ground, but the geometry here is anything but ordinary: a large circular bank, roughly 120 metres across and rising to about 2.5 metres, forms the outer rim of the monument, and within it sits a second, smaller circular enclosure with a flat, level interior some 75 metres in diameter. The two rings are not sealed off from one another; a sharply cut opening in the south-west of the inner enclosure lines up precisely with a nine-metre-wide gap in the outer bank, suggesting deliberate, planned access rather than later damage.
What makes this site particularly unusual is the way the earthwork was constructed. There is no fosse, the ditch that normally accompanies a bank of this kind and from which the material for the bank is typically dug. Instead, the bank material appears to have been scarped, that is, scraped and cut away, from the interior of the enclosure itself. This produces the distinctive sunken hollow that dominates the space between the two rings, a great bowl-like depression that gives the whole site its strange, almost theatrical quality. The outer bank has suffered considerably over time, disturbed by field walls, cattle tracks, and farm entrances, all the ordinary pressures of working agricultural land. The inner bank, though better preserved in relative terms, is no more imposing in its dimensions, matching the outer at roughly 11 metres wide. The combination of concentric enclosures, aligned entrances, and a scarped rather than ditched construction places this monument in a category that is not easily pinned down, and no definitive date or function has been established from the available evidence.