Enclosure, Carrowkeel, Co. Sligo
Co. Sligo |
Enclosures
Attached to the eastern side of a larger enclosure at Carrowkeel in County Sligo, this modest oval or subrectangular earthwork is easily overlooked, even by those who have sought it out.
What marks it as worth attention is less any individual dramatic feature and more the quiet accumulation of deliberate detail: a sod-covered wall and bank, a scarp that preserves the eastern edge, and a low interior terrace suggesting that whoever built this structure had a specific, considered use in mind.
The enclosure measures roughly 19.6 metres north to south and 12 metres east to west, placing it on the smaller end of the scale for this type of monument. The defining wall and bank, around 2.2 metres wide and standing between 0.6 and 0.8 metres high, may originally have been kerbed, meaning edged with upright or closely set stones to give the bank a more formal, contained profile. On the eastern side the wall has largely collapsed or eroded down to a scarp, a slope in the ground surface that marks where the boundary once stood. Inside, running along the northern to north-eastern arc, there is a low step or terrace roughly 1.4 metres wide and 0.4 metres high. This kind of internal terracing within an enclosure is not uncommon in Irish prehistoric and early medieval sites, though its precise function here is unknown. The structure is appended directly to the east side of a separate, associated enclosure nearby, suggesting the two formed part of a related complex rather than independent constructions.