Enclosure, Magheragillerneeve, Co. Sligo

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Magheragillerneeve, Co. Sligo

In a field of level wet pasture in Magheragillerneeve, County Sligo, there is a circle on the ground that is easy to miss and harder to explain.

A slightly raised area, roughly thirty metres across, is defined by a broad, low scarp of earth, a gentle bank-like edge only about forty centimetres high externally and two to two and a half metres wide. There is no fosse, the term for a surrounding ditch that typically accompanies such earthworks, visible at ground level. Whatever defined this place, it did so subtly, with no dramatic rampart and no obvious break to indicate where people once entered.

Enclosures of this kind are scattered across Ireland, ranging from prehistoric ringforts and early medieval farmsteads to features whose purpose remains genuinely unclear. The form here, a circular raised interior with a slight earthen boundary, is consistent with a ringfort, a type of enclosed settlement used broadly from the Iron Age through to the early medieval period, though without excavation any dating is speculative. What adds a small note of ambiguity to this particular site is a large, roughly rectangular boulder sitting just inside the scarped edge at the north-east. It measures around two metres wide, one and a half metres deep, and just over a metre high. It appears to be natural rather than placed, but its position close to the boundary, at a point where an entrance might logically have been located, gives it an incidental significance. The original entrance, if it ever read clearly in the landscape, is no longer recognisable.

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Pete F
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