Enclosure, Larkhill, Co. Sligo
Co. Sligo |
Enclosures
An aerial photograph once revealed something that ground-level inspection alone would struggle to confirm: a neat oval enclosure cut into the pasture at Larkhill in County Sligo, its western arc absorbed into a field boundary running roughly north-north-east to south-south-west.
That photograph captured something that no longer exists in any obvious form. Both the enclosure and those field boundaries have since been levelled, leaving behind only the subtlest of impressions in the land.
What remains today is a slightly raised, level area roughly twenty-five metres in diameter, sitting on a small terrace on a north-east-facing slope of undulating pasture. Its north-west to south-east extent is loosely defined by a broadly sloping scarp, about 1.8 metres high, that gradually merges with the natural gradient of the hillside. A fainter scarp crosses the interior on a north-east to south-west line, hinting at some internal division or earlier phase of use. Enclosures of this kind, broadly circular or oval earthwork boundaries that once defined a farmstead, a ritual space, or a defended settlement, are among the more common archaeological features in the Irish landscape, yet their precise function and date are rarely straightforward to establish without excavation. Here, the ground rising immediately to the south and the way the surviving earthwork blends into the slope make it particularly difficult to read as a distinct human intervention rather than a natural feature.