Enclosure, Ardabrone, Co. Sligo
Co. Sligo |
Enclosures
In a pasture field in Ardabrone, County Sligo, there is a low ring of earth and stone that most people would walk past without a second thought.
It sits on a gentle south-facing slope, barely announcing itself above the surrounding ground level, yet it is a distinct and deliberate shape: a roughly circular enclosure about eleven metres across, defined by a bank roughly three metres wide and less than half a metre tall at its interior face. No ditch, or fosse, survives at ground level around the outside, which sets it apart from the more familiar profile of a rath or ringfort, where an outer trench typically accompanies the inner bank.
Enclosures of this kind are found across Ireland and represent some of the more quietly puzzling features in the rural landscape. Without a fosse, and at this modest scale, the structure may have served as a small farmstead enclosure, an animal pen, or possibly a boundary with ritual or funerary significance, though the notes do not allow a firm conclusion on that point. What is clear is that the bank was constructed with some care, and that the wide break on the east-south-east side, around five metres across, almost certainly marks the original entrance. Enclosures with a single opposed gap like this are a recognised feature of early medieval Irish settlement, where the gap faces a particular direction, sometimes for practical reasons of drainage or access, sometimes for reasons now lost to us.