Enclosure, Lugdoon, Co. Sligo
Co. Sligo |
Enclosures
There is an enclosure at Lugdoon in County Sligo that exists, in practical terms, only on a map.
Standing on the ridge where it once stood, overlooking a narrow, steep-sided gully that cuts through the landscape from northwest to southeast, there is nothing to see. No earthwork, no upstanding stone, no crop mark to catch the eye. The site registers as an absence, which is itself a kind of presence.
The cartographic record tells a slightly puzzling story. When the Ordnance Survey produced its six-inch map series in 1837, this feature went unrecorded entirely. By the 1913 edition, however, it had been noted as a hachured feature, the mapmakers' shorthand for an earthwork or raised boundary, curving in an arc from west-southwest to north. That gap between editions suggests the enclosure may have been partially legible in the landscape at some point in the intervening decades, or that the later surveyors had access to local knowledge or earlier field observations not captured in the first survey. Enclosures of this kind are generally associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, serving as defined boundaries around farmsteads or places of habitation, though nothing in what survives here points firmly to a date or purpose. Whatever stood or was heaped up along that arc has since been absorbed entirely into the pasture.