It measures roughly ten metres north to south and just under six metres east to west, defined by a roughly built stone wall about seventy centimetres wide and one and a half metres tall. That wall is the whole story, and yet it raises a question that enclosures of this kind often do: was this ever anything more than a practical pen for animals, or does the effort of its construction suggest something else was expected of it?

The honest answer, following an inspection carried out in 1994, is that it was almost certainly just that, a functional enclosure for holding animals, dating to sometime after 1700. It sits within the northern half of a field system that itself belongs to the eighteenth or nineteenth century, a period when upland and marginal land across Ireland was being brought into more organised agricultural use. Rocky pasture on a north-facing mountain slope would have made demanding terrain for farming, and a solidly walled pen, even a modest one, would have been a practical asset for anyone managing livestock across that ground. The Ox Mountains run roughly east to west across County Sligo, and their lower slopes carry the kind of thin, stony soil that rewards effort only selectively. The enclosure fits that landscape without standing apart from it.