Enclosure, Cahercorney, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Enclosures
Some ancient enclosures announce themselves with earthen banks, standing stones, or at least a clear outline on the ground.
This one in Cahercorney, County Limerick, offers almost nothing to the naked eye at field level. It survives only as a ghostly circular cropmark, roughly 22 metres in diameter, pressed faintly into improved wet pasture and visible, if visible at all, from the air or through the lens of a satellite camera. It was never recorded on the Ordnance Survey's historic maps, which means it slipped through the usual nets of cartographic memory entirely.
The enclosure came to light in 1986, when the Bruff aerial photographic survey passed overhead and captured what analysts described as a curvilinear-shaped cropmark, possibly the remains of a circular earthwork. The reference image, catalogued as Bruff 296.2 (AP4/3605), showed enough of a pattern to flag the site for further attention. Cropmarks of this kind form when buried features, such as the filled-in ditches of a former enclosure, affect how vegetation grows above them, producing subtle differences in colour or height that are only legible from altitude. The record was later confirmed when an Ordnance Survey Ireland orthoimage taken between 2005 and 2012 showed the same faint ring, and a Google Earth image from 20 September 2020 captured it again. The site sits 15 metres north-east of a watercourse that also serves as the townland boundary with Loughgur, a landscape already well known for its concentration of prehistoric monuments. Two further enclosures recorded separately lie just 6 metres to the north-east and 9 metres to the north. The record was compiled by Alison McQueen and Vera Rahilly and uploaded in November 2020.
There is no marker, no sign, and no visible feature to reward a visit on foot. The surrounding land is improved wet pasture, meaning it has been drained and reseeded over time, which is precisely the kind of agricultural treatment that reduces an earthwork to nothing more than a soil anomaly. The watercourse nearby and the proximity to the Loughgur townland boundary give some orientation if you are working from a map, but the enclosure itself demands aerial or satellite viewing to make any sense of. The most practical way to engage with it is through the OSi Geohive platform or Google Earth, where the cropmark remains faintly legible under the right lighting and seasonal conditions, late summer growth tending to make such marks most distinct.