Enclosure, Larkhill, Co. Sligo

Co. Sligo |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Larkhill, Co. Sligo

On a low rise in rough grazing land at Larkhill in County Sligo, a circle of ferns and brambles marks the outline of something much older.

From the ground it reads as little more than an untidy patch of scrub, roughly eleven metres across, where the vegetation grows just a little too densely to be accidental. It takes an aerial photograph to reveal what is actually there: a faint but legible circular enclosure, the kind of form that recurs across the Irish landscape wherever people once drew a boundary around a dwelling, a farmstead, or a place that mattered.

Circular enclosures of this type are among the most common, and most quietly ambiguous, features of the Irish archaeological record. They range from the substantial ringforts of the early medieval period, which served as enclosed farmsteads for farming families of varying social rank, to much earlier prehistoric boundaries whose original purpose can be difficult to determine without excavation. At Larkhill, no dating evidence is noted, and the enclosure has not been excavated, so the question of who made it and when remains genuinely open. What the aerial record does confirm is that the shape is there, holding its form beneath the vegetation, on the slightly elevated ground that early settlers and farmers across Ireland tended to favour for exactly this kind of site.

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