Enclosure, Bunnafedia, Co. Sligo

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Bunnafedia, Co. Sligo

A modern field boundary cuts directly through the middle of this double enclosure in County Sligo, and in doing so it accidentally preserves the site's most revealing quality: two distinct prehistoric spaces, now divided between the townlands of Bunnafedia and Carrowconor, that were once clearly designed to work together.

The fact that it does not appear on the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1837 suggests it had already sunk below the threshold of local notice by the time the surveyors passed through, which makes its survival all the more quietly remarkable.

The western enclosure is the better preserved of the two, a roughly oval raised platform measuring just under twenty metres north to south and just under seventeen east to west, ringed by the remains of a drystone wall, built without mortar in the traditional manner, with stone kerbing still visible along both its inner and outer faces in places. A gap of around two metres in the western wall is consistent with an original entrance. Immediately to the east sits the second enclosure, broader in character and shaped closer to a D than an oval, with an enclosing wall that survives in a more fragmentary state. Inside it, a low scarp running roughly northeast to southwest, and facing southeast, hints at an internal division or raised feature whose original purpose is no longer legible. A narrow break in the wall between the two enclosures, perhaps a metre wide, is thought to have been the connecting entrance, allowing movement between the paired spaces. Together the two areas cover a modest footprint, but the care implied by the kerbing and the deliberate pairing of the spaces suggests a site that once had a specific and considered function, even if that function is now lost to us.

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