Enclosure, Carrowbrickeen, Co. Sligo

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Carrowbrickeen, Co. Sligo

On a rise of high ground in the undulating pasture of Carrowbrickeen, County Sligo, there sits a circular enclosure that has quietly accumulated layers of occupation across the centuries.

What makes it peculiar is not any single feature but the combination: a raised earthwork, the traces of a defensive ditch, and, sitting within the enclosure itself, the remains of a tower house and what appears to be a bawn. A bawn is a walled courtyard or enclosure, typically built to protect cattle and provide a defensible perimeter around a tower house, and finding one nested inside an already-enclosed earthwork gives the site an unusual, compacted quality, as though different periods of human use have simply folded in on top of one another.

The enclosure itself is roughly circular, measuring approximately 31 metres from north to south, with the raised interior standing somewhere between 3.5 and 4 metres above the surrounding ground. An outer bank survives in poor condition along the eastern and northern sides, and between that outer bank and the inner one there is an intervening fosse, a ditch intended to make the whole arrangement more difficult to breach, which remains visible to the north. The original entrance has not been identified, which is not unusual for earthworks of this kind where centuries of agricultural use and slow erosion have smoothed away the more delicate details. The tower house within, a type of compact fortified residence that became widespread across Ireland from the later medieval period, adds a more precisely datable layer to what may be a much older enclosure beneath it.

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Pete F
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