Enclosure, Sranagross, Co. Leitrim

Co. Leitrim |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Sranagross, Co. Leitrim

On the floor of the Glenfarne valley in County Leitrim, there is a grass-covered oval that the Ordnance Survey cartographers of 1910 simply recorded as a wood.

Locally, people have always called it a fort. That quiet disagreement between mapmakers and memory turns out to be more interesting than either label suggests, because the site is neither quite one thing nor the other: it is an earthen enclosure of the kind that dots the Irish countryside in various forms, its original purpose unconfirmed, its entrance unidentified, and its interior now marked only by tree-stumps where the oblong wood once stood.

The enclosure sits on a south-facing slope and takes a broadly oval or D-shaped form, measuring roughly 52 metres along its longer axis and 33 metres across. It is defined by an overgrown earthen bank, low but still legible in the landscape, with a shallow outer fosse, essentially a ditch running around the perimeter, that would once have helped throw the bank into sharper relief. Earthen enclosures of this type are among the most common archaeological features in Ireland, and they vary considerably in age and function; some were ringforts used as farmsteads in the early medieval period, others served different agricultural or ceremonial purposes entirely. At Sranagross, the precise origins remain unclear. What is certain is that by the time the 1910 Ordnance Survey sheet was drawn, the site had been so thoroughly colonised by trees that the surveyors mapped it as woodland rather than as any kind of monument, and the older local name for it had to persist on its own, passed along without cartographic support for the better part of a century.

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