Enclosure, Carrowgarry, Co. Sligo
Co. Sligo |
Enclosures
In a low-lying field in Carrowgarry, County Sligo, a large earthen bank curves through ordinary farmland, quietly enclosing an oval space that has almost certainly been there for over a thousand years.
What makes it slightly odd is the gap: at the south-west, the bank breaks open across a width of 18.5 metres, far wider than a typical entrance would require. The bank itself is still substantial, standing 1.4 metres high and 2.5 metres wide, and it has long since been absorbed into the working landscape, serving now as a field boundary.
The structure is a penannular enclosure, meaning it forms a near-complete ring with a deliberate opening rather than a fully closed circuit. These earthwork enclosures are found across Ireland and are generally associated with the early medieval period, though some have prehistoric origins. They functioned variously as settlement enclosures, farmsteads, or places with ceremonial or defensive significance. At the northern interior edge of this example, a shallow fosse, essentially a ditch, runs alongside the bank, about two metres wide. The overall dimensions, roughly 42 metres on the north-west to south-east axis and 34 metres across, place it at the larger end of what might once have been a modest enclosed farmstead, the kind that formed the basic unit of rural life in early medieval Ireland.
The bank's double life as a modern field boundary is probably what has kept it intact. Farmers had a practical reason not to level it, and so the enclosure has survived where others were ploughed away. The unusually wide south-west break remains unexplained by the available evidence; it could represent the original entrance widened over centuries of agricultural use, or something else entirely that the ground has not yet given up.