Enclosure, Carrownrush, Co. Sligo
Co. Sligo |
Enclosures
On a hilltop at Carrownrush in County Sligo, an oval earthwork sits inside a larger earthwork, like one ring placed deliberately within another.
The inner enclosure measures roughly 61.6 metres north to south and 52 metres east to west, its boundary formed by a levelled, slumped bank or scarp that still stands up to 1.4 metres high on its eastern side. Around it runs a fosse, the term for a man-made ditch, here about three metres wide and now reduced to a shallow depression in the ground. Between this inner enclosure and the outer hilltop enclosure that contains it, a clear band of open space some 25 to 30 metres wide remains, suggesting the arrangement was intentional rather than incidental.
What makes the site quietly peculiar is the layering of time visible within a relatively small area. The enclosure within an enclosure is an early medieval arrangement seen at various sites across Ireland, though the date and purpose of this particular example are not recorded. What is recorded is the presence, immediately to the north-west, of a Napoleonic-era signal tower. Signal towers of this period were built along Ireland's coastline in the early nineteenth century as part of a defensive communications network, intended to relay warnings of French naval activity. That a post-medieval military installation sits within the same hilltop enclosure as a much older earthwork is the kind of quiet collision of eras that tends to go unremarked. The interior of the inner enclosure slopes downward from west to east, following the natural gradient of the hill itself, which gives the whole arrangement an organic, almost tilted quality when you try to picture it in plan.