Enclosure, Gortnadrung, Co. Sligo

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Gortnadrung, Co. Sligo

At Gortnadrung in County Sligo, an archaeological enclosure occupies a south-east-facing slope somewhere beneath a dense plantation of coniferous and deciduous trees, and the peculiar thing about it is that nobody standing on the ground can confirm it is really there.

Two separate inspections, one in 1991 and one in 2012, found no upstanding remains whatsoever. The site exists, in practical terms, mainly as an image from the air.

The feature first appeared as a subrectangular hachured outline on the 1913 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, the standard large-scale mapping of Ireland that recorded field boundaries, earthworks, and landscape features in close detail. Even then its cartographic appearance gave surveyors pause: the depiction more closely resembled a quarry than an archaeological monument. Despite that ambiguity, it was formally classified as an enclosure, a broad category covering anything from a prehistoric farmstead boundary to a later enclosed settlement, in the Sites and Monuments Record of 1989 and again in the Record of Monuments and Places in 1995. What keeps it in the record at all is aerial photography, which reveals a ground feature whose plan corresponds closely enough to the mapped outline to suggest something genuinely is there, buried or so heavily degraded that the tree cover and soil have consumed every visible trace.

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