Enclosure, Drumlaheen, Co. Leitrim

Co. Leitrim |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Drumlaheen, Co. Leitrim

On a low rise in the rolling drumlin country of County Leitrim, a rough circle of stones pushes through the undergrowth, tracing the outline of something old enough that nobody recorded what it was for.

The site at Drumlaheen is known locally as Crockaun, a name derived from the Irish meaning a small hill or mound, and the enclosure itself is overgrown enough that its full shape can only be pieced together from fragments. What survives is an arc of revetted stone wall, meaning stone faced and backed to hold its form, visible intermittently along a curve running roughly south to west, across a circular area of approximately thirty metres in diameter.

The enclosure's obscurity is partly cartographic. It appears on the 1907 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, marked not with a confident outline but as an arc of hachures, the fine hatching surveyors used to suggest relief or uncertain earthworks, labelled in the cautious italic lettering the OS reserved for antiquities of unverified character. That it was noted at all suggests it was visible on the ground in the early twentieth century, though no earlier map appears to have recorded it. Michael J. Moore's Archaeological Inventory of County Leitrim, published by the Stationery Office in Dublin in 2003, gives the clearest modern description of what remains, though even that account is spare. The enclosure has not been excavated, and its date and function remain unassigned. Circular enclosures of this kind in the Irish landscape can range widely in age and purpose, from early medieval farmsteads to prehistoric ceremonial spaces, and without further investigation this one keeps its origins to itself.

The site sits atop a rise that would have given its builders a clear view over the undulating terrain around it, which may or may not have mattered to whoever raised the wall. The stone is still there, intermittently, beneath the growth.

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