Enclosure, Coollemoneen, Co. Sligo

The ground drops away steeply to the north-east into a small stream valley, and wide views open out from north to south-east, closed off only by a distant ridge on the horizon. What arrests the attention, if you know to look, is a broad arc of scarp, tracing a line roughly west to north-north-east across the hilltop. It is subtle, and in places it has been almost entirely flattened.

The feature does not appear on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1838, but by the time the twenty-five-inch plan was produced, and again on the 1914 six-inch revision, cartographers recorded it as an arc of hachuring, the short parallel lines used on older maps to indicate a slope or earthwork, curving across roughly twenty-five metres. On the ground, the scarp extends somewhat further, between twenty-nine and thirty metres along its chord. At the western end it survives as little more than a ripple in the turf, around thirty centimetres high across a slope two to three metres wide. Towards the north-north-east, where the artificial feature meets the natural break of the ridge, it is considerably better preserved, rising to nearly a metre with a slope width of around six metres. A faint undulation running on a north-south axis, possibly the ghost of an old field boundary, crosses the north-eastern end of the arc. Some two hundred and seventy-five metres to the west lies a rath, the kind of circular earthen enclosure commonly associated with early medieval farmsteads in Ireland, which raises the possibility that this ridge was a focus of activity over a long period.

What the scarp represents is genuinely uncertain. The working interpretation is that it forms the surviving north-western arc of what was once a circular enclosure, the remainder having been levelled at some point in the past. Whether it was a settlement enclosure, a stock enclosure, or something else entirely, the evidence remaining above ground is too fragmentary to say with confidence. The site sits quietly in grazing land, legible mainly to those already primed to read landscape in terms of slight changes in gradient and the odd, deliberate curve that does not quite follow the natural contour of the hill.