Enclosure, Kilrusheighter, Co. Sligo
Co. Sligo |
Enclosures
In the low-lying coastal pasture of Kilrusheighter in County Sligo, a barely perceptible rise in the ground holds something easy to walk past without noticing: a subrectangular enclosure whose boundaries now survive as little more than a gently raised platform and a few scattered scraps of earth and stone.
It measures roughly 27 metres along its longer axis and 15 metres across, with the most legible traces on its north-north-east and south-south-west sides, where a low bank, between two and a half and just over four metres wide and half a metre high, still marks out the original shape. Elsewhere the edge survives only as a slight scarp, the ground dropping away just enough to suggest something deliberate once stood here.
What makes this site quietly puzzling is its absence from the first detailed mapping of the area. When the Ordnance Survey produced its six-inch map series in 1837, the enclosure did not appear, which tells us something about its condition even by that relatively early date. It was already so reduced, or so ambiguous in the landscape, that the surveyors either overlooked it or judged it too indistinct to record. The same map does, however, show remnants of other field boundaries nearby, some of them now partly levelled, and traces of these can still be made out to the north, east, and south of the enclosure. A low scarp extending from the north-west to the west-north-west is thought to be what remains of one such boundary. Together these fragments suggest a landscape that was once more thoroughly organised and divided, the enclosure sitting within a broader pattern of agricultural activity whose outline has only grown fainter with time.