Enclosure, Doonally, Co. Sligo

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Doonally, Co. Sligo

In the low-lying pasture of Doonally in County Sligo, there is a site that exists now only on paper.

A small enclosure, roughly pentagonal in shape and measuring approximately ten metres across in each direction, once sat against the northern side of an east-west field boundary. It is the kind of place that rewards the patient reader of old maps rather than the person who actually goes looking for it, because at ground level there is simply nothing left to see.

What makes the record of this site quietly interesting is the gap between two Ordnance Survey editions. The 1837 six-inch map, which was produced during the first great systematic survey of Ireland and remains one of the most detailed historical snapshots of the country's rural landscape, shows no trace of the enclosure at all. By the 1913 edition, however, it had been recorded, attached to an existing field boundary and given that distinctive pentagonal outline. Enclosures of this general type in Ireland can have origins ranging from early medieval settlement to post-medieval agricultural use, though nothing in the available record specifies what this particular example was built for or when it was constructed. At some point between the 1913 survey and the present, it was levelled entirely, absorbed back into the surrounding farmland.

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Pete F
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