Enclosure, Skibbolecorragh, Co. Sligo

Co. Sligo |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Skibbolecorragh, Co. Sligo

On a gently sloping hillside in County Sligo, a circular earthwork sits quietly in the landscape, unrecorded on the Ordnance Survey's 1837 six-inch map and largely unremarked ever since.

That absence from the historical cartographic record is itself telling. Whatever this enclosure was, it had either fallen out of active use or out of collective memory long before the first systematic mapping of the Irish countryside got underway.

The structure measures roughly twenty metres in diameter. A bank of earth and stone, between one and a half and two and a half metres wide and surviving to an internal height of between 0.4 and 0.6 metres, curves around the northern, eastern, and western sides. Where the bank is absent, the builders simply cut into the slope and used the natural terracing of the ground to define the perimeter. There is no fosse, the term for a defensive ditch that typically accompanies earthen enclosures of this kind, which may say something about the site's original purpose, though it does not settle the question. A wide gap of seven metres on the eastern side provides an entrance, and beyond it lies a network of disused field banks, suggesting the enclosure once sat within a broader agricultural landscape. The most arresting detail emerged not from the enclosure itself but from roughly thirty metres to its south-south-east, where what had long been assumed to be a clearance cairn, a mound of stones gathered from nearby fields during land improvement, was eventually removed. Beneath it lay a roughly circular spread of stones, about seven metres across, set in grey-brown soil containing shell, animal bones, and traces of burning. The deposit does not fit neatly into the clearance cairn category it had been assigned, and its relationship to the enclosure remains an open question.

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