Enclosure, Rathglass, Co. Sligo

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Rathglass, Co. Sligo

At Rathglass in County Sligo, there is an enclosure that has all but disappeared into the field it sits in.

It occupies the eastern side of a low ridge, and what survives is little more than a slightly raised circular patch of ground, roughly 25 metres across, with its clearest edge marked by a faint scarp on the south-eastern side where an old boundary merged with a natural slope. Without knowing to look for it, a visitor walking across that pasture would likely notice nothing unusual at all.

The site has a quietly interesting cartographic history. When the Ordnance Survey produced its first detailed six-inch maps of Ireland in 1837, this enclosure was not recorded at all, which suggests it had already been substantially reduced by that point, or that it was too indistinct to catch the surveyors' attention. By the time the revised edition appeared in 1913, it was marked only as a shallow hachured arc, the conventional symbol used to indicate a slight earthwork or bank, curving from east to south-west. Since then, even that outline has been further levelled, leaving the barely perceptible rise in the ground as the only physical trace of what was once a defined enclosure. Circular enclosures of this kind are a common feature of the Irish landscape and can date from the early medieval period, functioning as farmsteads, settlements, or sometimes ceremonial spaces, though without excavation it is rarely possible to say which a particular example represents. This one, at Rathglass, has reached the point where the historical record holds more of its shape than the ground itself does.

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Pete F
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