Enclosure, Mullaghmore, Co. Sligo

Co. Sligo |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Mullaghmore, Co. Sligo

On a high ridge above Mullaghmore, a circular enclosure sits almost entirely invisible, swallowed by dense rushes and levelled to near-nothing at some point in the unrecorded past.

No edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps ever captured it; it exists in the documentary record only because a circular outline showed up in aerial imagery, and on the ground it announces itself as little more than a very slightly raised ring, somewhere between seventeen and eighteen metres across. That such a modest feature occupies one of the more commanding positions in the area makes it all the more quietly intriguing.

The enclosure sits on a terrace cut into the ridge, with the ground climbing away to the south and south-west and a steep drop falling to flat, damp land immediately to the north and north-east. From this position, the views open out across a wide arc: the Ox Mountains to the north-west, Knocknarea to the north-north-west, and the Ballygawley and Dartry Mountains ranging across the north-north-east. Whether the enclosure's builders chose the site for its visibility or for its defensibility is unknown, but the position would have served either purpose well. A rath, the Irish term for a roughly circular earthen enclosure typically associated with early medieval farmsteads, stands just fifteen metres to the west, and a second lies a hundred and sixty metres to the east. The clustering of these features across the same ridge suggests this was a landscape that people organised themselves within rather deliberately, though the chronology and relationship between the three enclosures remains unclear.

Finding any trace of this feature at ground level requires patience and a tolerance for wet ground. The rushes are dense enough to conceal the outline almost entirely, and what can be glimpsed, a faint, slightly elevated arc in the rough pasture, is easily missed. The aerial view remains the clearest way to understand the shape of what once stood here.

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Pete F
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