Enclosure, Cloonakeemoge, Co. Sligo

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Cloonakeemoge, Co. Sligo

On a level ridge top in Cloonakeemoge, County Sligo, there is a slightly raised rectangular area of ground that most people would walk across without a second thought.

It sits in ordinary pasture, and yet its dimensions, roughly 33.5 metres east to west and 17.6 metres north to south, suggest something deliberately made rather than naturally formed. This is an enclosure, the kind of bounded space that appears across Ireland in various forms and periods, sometimes associated with habitation, sometimes with ritual or agricultural use, and sometimes with purposes that remain genuinely unclear.

What marks it out, to a careful eye, is the way its edges behave differently on each side. To the north there is a low raised rim, only about a quarter of a metre high on the exterior, suggesting an earthen bank that has largely settled back into the land. To the east and south, the boundary becomes a more pronounced scarp, a sharp drop in the ground surface, rising between 0.7 and 1 metre. At the eastern edge, some stones are just visible along the top of that scarp, possibly the remnants of a kerb or low wall that once gave the enclosure a more formal definition. To the west, a field boundary and roadway have absorbed or replaced whatever original edge existed there. The interior is not entirely flat; the eastern half slopes gently downward from west to east. No original entrance survives in a recognisable form, which is itself a small puzzle, since every enclosed space of this kind once had a way in.

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Pete F
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