Enclosure, Cummeen, Co. Sligo

Co. Sligo |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Cummeen, Co. Sligo

In the townland of Cummeen in County Sligo, overgrowth has quietly consumed a circular earthwork that raises more questions than it answers.

The enclosure is defined by a low bank, roughly four and a half metres wide at its base and tapering to about three metres at the top, forming a near-perfect circle thirty-two metres across. What makes it quietly unusual is the combination of features it lacks as much as those it has. There are no breaks in the bank, meaning no obvious original entrance survives, and there is no fosse, the surrounding ditch that typically accompanies an earthen enclosure of this kind. Without that ditch, the bank itself must have been built up from material brought in rather than scooped from the ground immediately outside, which is a small but telling detail.

At the centre of the flat interior sits a cairn, a mound of gathered stones that, in Irish prehistoric and early medieval contexts, could serve purposes ranging from burial to boundary marking. The combination of a circular embanked enclosure with a central cairn is not an everyday arrangement. Embanked enclosures in Ireland are a broad and varied category, encompassing everything from early medieval ringforts to prehistoric ceremonial sites, and without excavation it is difficult to assign this one to any particular period or function with confidence. The very low profile of the bank, rising only around fifteen centimetres on the interior and twenty-four centimetres on the exterior, suggests either considerable age and erosion, or an original construction that was never intended to be a defensive barrier at all.

The site is described as engulfed in overgrowth, which means the earthwork and its central cairn are unlikely to read clearly on the ground without close attention to the slight changes in level underfoot.

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Pete F
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