Enclosure, Largan, Co. Sligo
Co. Sligo |
Enclosures
On the southern slope of Benalta in County Sligo, there is an archaeological enclosure that can no longer be seen.
Levelled to the point of invisibility at ground level, it survives now only as a shape on paper, a D-form recorded on the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1838 before whatever remained of it was lost to the gradual work of pasture and time. The enclosure, roughly 15 metres across its northeast-to-southwest axis, had a notably straight southwest side running some 20 metres in length, which gave it that distinctive D-shaped outline. Enclosures of this kind are a common enough feature of the Irish early medieval landscape, typically defined by an earthen bank or fosse and used to enclose a farmstead or, in some cases, an early ecclesiastical site, but without excavation it is rarely possible to say which purpose any individual example served.
What makes this site quietly interesting is less what it was than what it has become. By the time the 1838 map was being drawn, the surveyors were already capturing something faint enough to warrant recording carefully. Today the slope is open grazing land, and there is nothing on the surface to indicate that any structure ever occupied the hillside. The map itself becomes the primary artefact, a piece of documentary evidence preserving the memory of a feature that the ground no longer holds.