Earthwork, Ballyloundash, Co. Limerick

Co. Limerick |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Earthwork, Ballyloundash, Co. Limerick

Some monuments announce themselves with height or drama.

This one, tucked into reclaimed pasture in Ballyloundash, Co. Limerick, has spent decades doing the opposite, fading so thoroughly into the landscape that by 2020 it had effectively ceased to be visible from above at all. What survives is a roughly circular earthwork about ten metres in diameter, and even that description is generous; on satellite imagery captured between 2005 and 2013, it registers as little more than a faint shadow in the ground. On a Google Earth image taken in September 2020, it vanishes entirely.

The monument was first identified not by fieldwork but by aerial photography, during the Bruff aerial photographic survey of 1986, when the circular outline showed up as a cropmark, the kind of subtle discolouration in growing vegetation that reveals buried or disturbed ground beneath. Cropmarks appear when variations in soil depth or moisture cause crops above ancient features to ripen or stress at different rates from the surrounding field, making buried structures legible only from altitude and only under the right conditions. The site never appeared on Ordnance Survey Ireland historic maps, which suggests it was either already reduced to near-invisibility by the time systematic mapping began, or simply escaped notice. It sits about forty metres south-east of a public road that marks the townland boundary with Rootiagh to the north-west, and just twenty-two metres to the south-south-west of a moated site, a type of medieval enclosure typically consisting of a raised platform surrounded by a water-filled ditch and associated with high-status residences of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

Access to the field itself would require landowner permission, and given the monument's near-total invisibility on recent imagery, a visit on the ground may offer little reward without careful prior research using the 1986 aerial survey image, referenced as Bruff 155.02 (AP 4/3635). The neighbouring moated site, recorded separately in the Sites and Monuments Record as LI032-203, may be easier to interpret in context. The survival of any surface trace here depends heavily on seasonal conditions, and earlier orthoimages from the 2005 to 2013 period suggest there are moments when the faint earthwork just about holds its outline. The site was compiled for the record by Alison McQueen and Vera Rahilly and uploaded in November 2020.

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