Enclosure, Ballyloundash, Co. Limerick

Co. Limerick |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Ballyloundash, Co. Limerick

Some ancient enclosures announce themselves with earthworks you can walk around and feel beneath your feet.

This one in Ballyloundash, County Limerick, does none of that. It exists, for all practical purposes, only from the air, as a faint oval shadow pressed into wet pasture, the kind of mark that most people would cross without a second thought. What makes it worth attention is precisely that invisibility: a monument so thoroughly levelled that it left no trace on any Ordnance Survey historic map, and yet stubbornly legible to the right instruments at the right moment.

The enclosure came to light during the Bruff aerial photographic survey of 1986, which identified it as an oval-shaped cropmark near the southern end of what appears to be a land drain. Cropmarks form when buried features, ditches, banks, walls, or pits, affect the growth of crops or grass above them, producing colour and texture differences visible from altitude. Here, the mark outlines an oval roughly 35 metres along its northwest to southeast axis and 26 metres across the northeast to southwest, defined by what may be a fosse, a term for the type of enclosing ditch commonly found around ringforts and similar early medieval enclosures. The site sits on low-lying wet pasture, 135 metres east of the townland boundary with Ballinard and about 185 metres east of a main watercourse. Later orthoimagery, both from the Ordnance Survey Ireland series taken between 2005 and 2012 and from Google Earth imagery dated 6 April 2006, confirmed the cropmark at the southeast end of a gently curving depression, suggesting the drain itself may be ancient, or at least long-established. The record was compiled by Alison McQueen and Vera Rahilly and uploaded in November 2020.

There is no visitor infrastructure here, no signage, no path leading to a viewing point. The site sits on private farmland in low-lying ground that is, by its own description, wet pasture, so any approach on foot would require landowner permission and appropriate footwear for soft ground. The enclosure carries no monument number in the national record. For most visitors, the most accessible version of this place is the aerial imagery itself, the annotated Bruff survey photograph and the Google Earth orthoimage, which together show what patient, low-altitude observation can recover from a field that looks, at ground level, entirely unremarkable.

Rated 0 out of 5

Visitor Notes

Review type for post source and places source type not found
Added by
Picture of Pete F
Pete F
IrishHistory.com is passionate about helping people discover and connect with the rich stories of their local communities.
Please use the form below to submit any photos you may have of Enclosure, Ballyloundash, Co. Limerick. We're happy to take any suggested edits you may have too. Please be advised it will take us some time to get to these submissions. Thank you.
Name
Email
Message
Upload images/documents
Maximum file size: 100 MB
If you'd like to add an image or a PDF please do it here.

Advertisement