Enclosure, Kiltycahill, Co. Sligo
Co. Sligo |
Enclosures
In a gently rolling pasture at Kiltycahill in County Sligo, a barely perceptible rise in the ground marks what was once a deliberately constructed enclosure.
Nearly square in plan, measuring roughly 28 metres east to west and 27 metres north to south, it is defined by an earthen scarp, a low bank-like edge of compacted earth, that stands less than half a metre above the surrounding land. There is no visible fosse, the ditched depression that typically accompanies such earthworks, and no trace of an original entrance remains. The whole thing is, in the understated language of field archaeology, irregular and disturbed.
What makes the site quietly curious is its absence from the 1837 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, the great nineteenth-century cartographic project that documented Ireland's landscape in extraordinary detail. That omission suggests the feature was either not recognised at the time, or had already been sufficiently degraded to escape the surveyors' notice. Enclosures of this kind, roughly rectangular and defined by earthen scarps, turn up across Ireland in a variety of periods and contexts, from early medieval farmsteads to later stock enclosures, and without excavation it is rarely possible to assign a confident date. The slight north-north-east-facing slope on which it sits is an unremarkable setting, which is perhaps part of the point: these were functional boundaries, not monuments built for show.