Enclosure, Creggyconnell, Co. Sligo
Co. Sligo |
Enclosures
At Creggyconnell in County Sligo, a low circular rise in the pasture marks a place that most walkers would pass without a second glance.
It is only eleven metres across, its defining edge a modest earth and stone scarp rising less than a metre at its highest point, and much of even that has been worn or levelled away. Yet the shape is deliberate, the product of human effort rather than the gently rolling limestone geology that surrounds it.
This is a ringfort, or rather the remnant of one, the kind of enclosed settlement that was built across Ireland in enormous numbers during the early medieval period, typically between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Ringforts usually consist of a raised circular area defined by one or more earthen banks, sometimes accompanied by a fosse, the external ditch that provides the material for the bank itself. Here, no fosse is detectable at ground level, and the scarp that remains has an irregular profile complicated by natural limestone outcrops breaking through the surface. The enclosure sits on a slight rocky rise, which may have made the digging of a conventional ditch impractical, or the geology may simply have been incorporated into whatever boundary was constructed. A modern field boundary bank, oriented north to south, now cuts across the eastern arc of the enclosure, overriding the older edge from roughly the north-east to the south-east. Beyond that point, running from the south-east around to the south-south-west, the scarped edge has been largely levelled and is barely legible. The original entrance has not been identified.
What survives is a quietly ambiguous feature, part archaeological monument, part landscape accident, its edges softened by centuries of agriculture and the slow insistence of the limestone beneath.