Enclosure, Drinaghan More, Co. Sligo
Co. Sligo |
Enclosures
In a flat stretch of pasture in Drinaghan More, a low rise in the ground holds more order within it than the landscape around it might suggest.
What appears at first to be a gentle mound is in fact a carefully shaped platform, roughly 32 metres east to west and 15 metres north to south, raised less than a metre above the surrounding field but enclosed by a shallow fosse, the kind of ditch that in Irish early medieval archaeology typically marks the boundary of a defended or ceremonially bounded space. The fosse here is about four metres wide, and along its outer lip to the south and west, a modern field boundary follows the curve of the old enclosure almost exactly, as though the land itself remembered where the line was drawn.
The site was recorded as a circular enclosure on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1837, which gives some sense of how legible it still was in the nineteenth century. What the ground reveals in more detail is a site of some internal complexity. A north to south bank, roughly three metres wide and about 40 centimetres high, runs across the platform and divides it into two unequal sections. The larger western portion retains traces of its own bounding bank along the southern and north-northwestern edge, and tucked into its south-eastern corner are the remains of what may be a hut site. The smaller eastern portion is largely taken up by a circular sub-enclosure or possible house. The layering of these features, a main enclosure, an internal dividing bank, subsidiary structures within each section, hints at a site that was used over time and adapted for different purposes, though exactly when and by whom remains unclear.