Enclosure, Doonally, Co. Sligo
Co. Sligo |
Enclosures
In the gently undulating pasture of Doonally, County Sligo, there is a monument that no longer exists, at least not in any form the eye can catch.
The ground is smooth, the grass unbroken, and nothing rises to suggest that anything was ever here. Yet the site is recorded, classified, and carries the quiet weight of something that was once considered worth mapping.
What the cartographers of 1913 captured on the six-inch Ordnance Survey map was a roughly circular enclosure of approximately ten metres in diameter, indicated by hachures, the fine radiating lines surveyors used to suggest an earthen bank or raised feature. The same ground had been surveyed once before, in 1837, and nothing was marked. Whether the feature was simply missed in the earlier survey, or whether it became visible or notable only in the intervening decades, is not recorded. By the time anyone thought to document it properly, the monument had already been levelled, leaving no remains visible at ground level. Small circular enclosures of this kind are found across Ireland and are often associated with early medieval settlement or agriculture, sometimes serving as the enclosing banks of a ringfort or a livestock pound, though without surviving fabric or excavation, this particular example cannot be assigned to any period or function with confidence.
What remains is essentially a cartographic ghost: a circle on a map from 1913, representing a low earthwork that was already on its way out, set within farmland that has since absorbed it entirely.