Enclosure, Killeenduff, Co. Sligo

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Killeenduff, Co. Sligo

In a field in Killeenduff, County Sligo, there is an oval patch of ground that is not quite the same as the ground around it.

It sits on a slight rise in gently undulating pasture, measuring roughly 39 metres east to west and 30 metres north to south, and its boundary is marked by nothing more dramatic than a low, broad earthen scarp, at most 0.4 metres in height. No ditch, or fosse, survives at ground level. No original entrance can be traced. To a passing eye it might register as nothing at all, a faint swelling of the land, the kind of thing a farmer notices only when the light is low and the shadows stretch.

What it is, in archaeological terms, is an enclosure, a category of monument that covers a wide range of prehistoric and early medieval activity. Enclosures of this type were typically formed by throwing up an earthen bank, sometimes with an accompanying ditch, to define a bounded space. That space might have served as a farmstead, an area for keeping livestock, a place of ritual significance, or some combination of purposes that no longer leaves any obvious trace. The absence of a visible fosse here may simply reflect centuries of gradual erosion and agricultural smoothing, the slow work of weather and ploughing on a boundary that was never especially massive to begin with. What remains is the faintest insistence that something once mattered enough to be marked out.

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Pete F
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