Enclosure, Carrowkeel, Co. Sligo

Co. Sligo |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Carrowkeel, Co. Sligo

On a steep south-facing slope at Carrowkeel in County Sligo, two adjoining enclosures sit quietly in open pasture, their outlines still legible in the grass despite centuries of weathering and neglect.

What makes them quietly odd is not just their age or purpose, which remain uncertain, but the fact that they were apparently unknown to, or at least unrecorded by, the cartographers who produced the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps in 1837. That early Victorian mapping exercise was remarkably thorough across Ireland, capturing field boundaries, ruins, and earthworks at a level of detail rarely matched before or since. To be absent from it suggests either that the enclosures were already too degraded to catch a surveyor's eye, or that they lay sufficiently out of the way to escape notice entirely.

The western of the two enclosures is a slightly raised, D-shaped area measuring roughly 22 metres east to west and 15.5 metres north to south. Its curved side is formed by a low, partially sod-covered heap of loose stones, two and a half to three metres wide but barely rising above the surrounding ground level on the interior. The straight side of the D is not an original construction at all, but a later north-south field boundary wall that appears to have been built across, or perhaps incorporating, whatever once stood there. No original entrance can be identified. Adjoining it to the east is a subrectangular raised area, slightly larger in the north-south direction at nearly 20 metres, defined by a sod-covered wall that survives most clearly as a scarp on the southern side, standing just over a metre high. Inside this eastern enclosure, running along the northern interior, a low terrace roughly 1.4 metres wide and 0.4 metres high adds another layer of structural complexity, suggesting the space was not simply an animal pen but something with more deliberate internal organisation, though what that purpose was remains unresolved.

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