Enclosure, Inishkeen Island, Co. Leitrim

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Inishkeen Island, Co. Leitrim

On the 1909 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, a large enclosure on Inishkeen Island in Lough Melvin is marked in italic lettering as the "Friars Garden".

That typographic choice is significant: italic script on OS maps of this period typically indicated an antiquity or a name with historical weight rather than a functioning feature. The enclosure is substantial, stretching roughly 240 metres from west to east and between 50 and 60 metres across, sitting within deciduous woodland close to the island's northern shore.

What survives on the ground today is a collapsed rubble bank, the most legible section surviving at the eastern end, where it still reaches somewhere between half a metre and a metre in height and around three metres in width. The name points to a religious community of some kind, most likely a mendicant or monastic presence, though the notes do not record which order may have worked the ground. What complicates the picture slightly is the discovery of slag on the northern shore of the island during the 1940s. Slag is the glassy waste left over from smelting metal, and its presence suggests some industrial activity alongside, or perhaps after, whatever ecclesiastical use gave the enclosure its name. Whether the two are connected, or separated by centuries, is not clear from what has been recorded so far.

Inishkeen Island lies in Lough Melvin, a lake that straddles the border between Leitrim and Fermanagh and is known among anglers for its distinctive local trout species. The island itself is small, roughly 800 metres at its longest, and the enclosure occupies a considerable proportion of its northern side. Access would require a boat, and the woodland that now covers the site has presumably obscured much of what the bank once enclosed.

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