Enclosure, Barnacoghil, Co. Sligo

Co. Sligo |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Barnacoghil, Co. Sligo

An oval hillock rising out of boggy Sligo pasture, ringed at its base by a low earthen bank, never made it onto any edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map.

It was not discovered through fieldwork or local knowledge but from the air, spotted on an aerial photograph in the GSI collection. That alone sets it apart: a site that left no cartographic trace across generations of surveying, quietly sitting in rough, undulating ground until a photograph caught the shadow of it.

The hillock itself is a natural feature, roughly 60.5 metres east to west and 54.5 metres north to south, rising between 1.6 and 1.8 metres above the surrounding terrain. What makes it an enclosure rather than simply a lump of ground is the low bank that wraps around its base, around two metres wide, standing only about 0.2 metres above the interior surface but rising to between 0.6 and 0.8 metres on the exterior face. Whether this bank is an original construction or a later modification of the natural rise is not known. On the western half of the hillock's top, there is a roughly circular, relatively level space about 12 metres in diameter, with what appears to be deliberate scarping on its eastern side, suggesting the ground was at some point cut or shaped by hand. Within that levelled area, toward the northwest, sits a circular pit approximately 4 metres across and 0.8 metres deep, waterlogged at its base and partly obscured by vegetation. A waterlogged pit within an enclosed, possibly worked space on a naturally prominent rise is the kind of combination that invites speculation about function and date, though no excavation has been carried out and no firm answers are available. The site remains unclassified in any meaningful sense, an anomaly in boggy ground that archaeology has not yet had reason to open up.

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Pete F
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