Enclosure, Portavaud, Co. Sligo
Co. Sligo |
Enclosures
At Portavaud in County Sligo, there is an enclosure so small that a person could cross its interior in a few paces.
Measuring just 2.20 metres in length and 2.80 metres in width, it is an intimate thing, defined by an inner ditch half a metre wide and an outer bank nearly twice that, arranged along a north-north-west to south-south-east axis. That combination of ditch and bank, one sitting inside the other, is the basic grammar of enclosure in the Irish landscape, a boundary technique used across millennia for purposes ranging from the domestic to the ritual. What makes this particular example quietly curious is its scale. It is too small to have served as a conventional farmyard enclosure or a ringfort, those familiar circular earthworks that dot Irish fields by the tens of thousands. Whatever it was meant to contain or demarcate, it was something modest in extent, if not necessarily in significance.