Enclosure, Doonally, Co. Sligo

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Enclosure, Doonally, Co. Sligo

A field fence runs straight through the middle of what was once a circular enclosure at Doonally, Co. Sligo, bisecting a structure that nobody thought to record on any edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps.

The enclosure only came to light through aerial imagery, and even on the ground its presence is easy to miss. Levelled at some unknown point in the past, it survives now as the faintest of impressions, a roughly circular outline about 28 metres in diameter, readable more as a series of low scarps and subtle changes in gradient than as anything obviously man-made.

The site sits on an east-facing terrace along a ridge of sharply undulating ground. To the west, the land rises and closes off any long view in that direction; to the east it falls away towards flat, damp ground below. On the south-western arc, a curving scarp survives, its slope between 3.5 and 3.8 metres wide and no more than 0.6 metres high on the exterior, before it fades out to the north-west into irregular sloping ground. On the other side of the field boundary, the north-eastern arc can still be traced as a levelled scarp roughly 4 metres wide, hugging a natural contour of the ridge, though it becomes increasingly indistinct as it curves around to the south-east. An enclosure of this kind, sometimes called a rath, would typically have served as a defended farmstead in early medieval Ireland, a raised ringwork enclosing a domestic space. Whether this one fits that category precisely is uncertain given how little of it remains. What is clear is that it sits within a notably dense local landscape: a rath lies 180 metres to the east-south-east, and a wedge tomb, a type of megalithic burial monument dating to the late Neolithic or early Bronze Age, stands 260 metres to the north-north-west. The enclosure was brought to official attention by Jean-Charles Caillère, without whose observation it might have remained entirely unrecorded.

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Pete F
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