Enclosure, Annaghgowan, Co. Sligo
Co. Sligo |
Enclosures
On the eastern shore of Lough Arrow, at the mouth of Loughbrick Bay, a low oval earthwork sits so close to the water's edge that part of its enclosing bank has effectively dissolved into the lakeside margin.
The structure is an enclosure, a broad category of monument common across early medieval Ireland, typically a roughly circular or oval area defined by a bank and sometimes a ditch, which could have served as a settlement, a farmstead, or a place of ritual significance. What makes this particular example quietly odd is the degree to which it has been absorbed back into the landscape, its boundaries obscured by dense overgrowth, its interior split between a firm dry corner and a sodden expanse thick with irises and reeds.
The enclosure measures approximately 25 metres on its northeast to southwest axis and around 30 metres across from northwest to southeast. Its most substantial section of bank survives on the southern and west-northwest to north-northeast sides, where it reaches an external height of just over a metre and a width of 3.5 metres. Towards the lake on the southwest and west, the bank diminishes to a low stony scarp, barely 0.6 metres high, capped by a faint internal rim. A broad depression running outside the bank to the north and east, roughly 8 metres wide and nearly a metre deep, looks at first like a fosse, the term for the outer ditch that typically accompanies an earthen bank, but the ground here suggests it is more likely the result of comparatively recent quarrying into the rising land to the east and southeast. A later field boundary wall, running northeast to southwest, now bisects the level interior, a reminder that the site has seen continuous, if quiet, use long after its original function was forgotten.