Enclosure, Leekfield, Co. Sligo

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Leekfield, Co. Sligo

On the lower slopes of a limestone hill in County Sligo, a low grassy bank curves around a roughly rectangular patch of ground, its purpose and age still unresolved.

The enclosure at Leekfield is not a dramatic ruin; it is the kind of feature that rewards a careful eye rather than a casual glance, a subtle earthwork that raises more questions than it answers.

The hill it sits on is identified on the 1913 Ordnance Survey six-inch map as Red Hill, and it is on that same edition that the enclosure first appears, drawn as a penannular hachured area open to the south-east. It had not been recorded on the earlier 1837 OS map, which suggests it was either overlooked by earlier surveyors or came into being, or into recognisable form, between those two surveys. The enclosure is sub-rectangular to polygonal in outline, measuring roughly 28 metres on its longer north-north-west to south-south-east axis and about 15 metres across. Its south-east and north-east sides are marked by a low, grass-covered stony bank, one to two metres wide, which may be the remains of a collapsed wall. The western side has a gap of about 1.8 metres that appears to be an original entrance. Immediately to the east sits a cashel, a type of stone-walled enclosure typically associated with early medieval settlement and farming in Ireland, and the relationship between the two features is telling: the enclosure's eastern boundary is partly formed by the cashel's own ruined wall, indicating that whoever built or used the enclosure did so after the cashel was already there, incorporating its remains into the new boundary rather than building fresh. A relict field wall extends further to the north-west from the enclosure's corner, hinting at a wider agricultural landscape now largely vanished. The interior itself is uneven, with the southern half sitting at a noticeably higher level than the northern half, which slopes away to the north. Whether the enclosure served as a stock pen, a garden, or something else entirely remains genuinely uncertain.

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