Earthwork, Drinaghan More, Co. Sligo

Co. Sligo |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Earthwork, Drinaghan More, Co. Sligo

At the western fringe of a stretch of poorly drained pasture in Drinaghan More, County Sligo, there is a low circular platform that never made it onto any edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map.

That omission is not a small thing. The OS six-inch series, produced from the 1830s onwards, was one of the most exhaustive cartographic exercises ever carried out in Ireland, and features that escaped it tend to be either very subtle or simply overlooked by surveyors moving quickly through unremarkable ground. This earthwork is both.

The platform itself is modest in scale, roughly twenty metres across, and defined by a scarp, a slight but deliberate drop in ground level, running between forty and sixty centimetres in height around its edge. That low escarpment is enough to mark it out as something shaped by human effort rather than natural drainage. On top of the raised area sit two oblong structures, their form suggesting the remains of hut sites, the kind of simple enclosed shelters associated with early settlement or seasonal activity in the Irish landscape. Nothing in the surviving evidence pins them to a particular period, and without excavation the structures remain suggestive rather than certain, the outlines of habitation rather than confirmed proof of it.

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Pete F
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