Enclosure, Killeenduff, Co. Sligo

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Killeenduff, Co. Sligo

At Killeenduff in County Sligo, there is a scheduled monument that no longer exists in any physical sense.

The ground is flat, unmarked, and offers nothing to the eye. What makes this particular absence interesting is the paper trail that briefly captured the site before it vanished: an enclosure, roughly semi-circular in outline, measuring around twenty metres along its northwest to southeast axis and ten metres across, was recorded on the 1913 revision of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map using hachures, the fine lines surveyors used to suggest earthen banks or raised ground. By the time anyone thought to look more closely, the feature had been levelled entirely.

The earlier 1837 edition of the same map series shows nothing at this location, which raises a quiet question: was the enclosure simply missed by the first surveyors, or did it become visible, or notable, only in the intervening decades? Enclosures of this kind are typically the remnants of early medieval settlement, the circular or sub-circular earthen boundaries that once defined a farmstead or small defended homestead. Without excavation it is impossible to say what this one was, and excavation is no longer a straightforward proposition when the surface evidence is gone. The 1913 map entry is, in effect, the only surviving record of its shape and scale.

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