Earthwork, Ballingarry, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Ritual/Ceremonial
A low rise in rough pasture, a barely perceptible swell in the ground that most walkers would step over without a second thought, turns out to be something the Ordnance Survey once considered worth recording as a fort.
This earthwork in Ballingarry, County Limerick, sits about fourteen metres north of a watercourse marking the townland boundary with Bohereenkyle, and its quiet presence in the landscape belies a history of official notice and subsequent neglect. What makes it quietly odd is the gap between what surveyors saw and what maps chose to show.
When the Ordnance Survey first mapped Ireland at the six-inch scale in 1840, this monument was left off the sheet entirely, yet the surveyors did not ignore it altogether. Their notebooks, compiled as part of the same project, recorded it as one of four ancient forts in the townland, a term used loosely at the time to describe the earthwork enclosures, often of early medieval date, that punctuate the Irish countryside. By the time the twenty-five-inch map was produced in 1897, the feature had earned its place on the sheet, depicted as a raised sub-circular platform roughly eighteen metres in diameter, its edge defined by a scarp, a term for a steep slope or near-vertical face of earthwork that marks the outer edge of a raised enclosure. Later aerial imagery, including Digital Globe and Google Earth orthoimages taken between 2011 and 2013, shows the monument more clearly as a D-shaped raised area, with a fosse, that is, a ditch, running from the south, around the west, and up to the north. The eastern side has been cut into by a field boundary running north to south, which has truncated whatever original shape the earthwork once held on that side.
The site lies in rough pasture, which is something of a preservation bonus; land that has never been ploughed tends to retain earthwork features that cultivation would long since have flattened. The watercourse to the south marks the edge of Ballingarry townland and provides a useful landmark for anyone trying to locate the monument in the field. Because the scarp is low and the platform subtle, the feature reads best in low winter light, when shadows pick out slight changes in ground level that summer grass tends to obscure. There is no formal access or signage, and the surrounding ground is agricultural land.