Earthwork, Carrownaboll, Co. Sligo

Co. Sligo |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Earthwork, Carrownaboll, Co. Sligo

A low, sod-covered earthwork in a field in Carrownaboll, County Sligo managed to escape the attention of mapmakers entirely.

It appears on no edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, the standard cartographic record of rural Ireland from the 1830s onward, and was only brought to light through aerial photography, which can reveal subtle differences in vegetation and ground texture invisible at eye level.

The site is a composite of several features that together suggest a layered history of enclosure and quarrying. At the south-western end is a small D-shaped area, roughly thirteen metres east to west and just over ten metres north to south, bounded on its straight western side by a field wall and on the curved northern, eastern, and southern sides by a stony bank covered in sod. That bank, between three and three and a half metres wide, rises only about eighty centimetres on the interior face. What makes this particular feature legible is the 1837 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, which, though it does not show the earthwork itself, marks this spot with the word "Pound". A pound was a enclosure used to detain stray livestock until their owners paid a fine to reclaim them, a commonplace piece of rural infrastructure that rarely survived in recognisable form into the modern period. From that D-shaped enclosure, a narrow raised spine of ground extends roughly sixteen metres to the north-east, where it broadens into a low east-west rise. The rise shows signs of disturbance, with irregular quarry holes filled in with sod suggesting that stone was removed here at some point. At the eastern end of this rise sits a roughly circular heap of field stones about five metres across, still covered in turf. To the west lies an area of wet ground, and a drain runs north-westward across the field.

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