Enclosure, Cloghaderreen, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Enclosures
There is an enclosure in the townland of Cloghaderreen, County Limerick, that has never appeared on any Ordnance Survey historic map, and yet it is unmistakably there, pressed into the earth of a northwest-facing slope in what is now ordinary improved pasture.
It exists, for most practical purposes, only from the air.
The monument was identified by the Archaeological Survey of Ireland through oblique aerial photographs taken on 13 September 2002, which revealed a large oval-shaped cropmark in the field. Cropmarks appear when buried features, such as the ditches or banks of an ancient enclosure, affect the growth of crops or grass above them; buried ditches tend to retain more moisture, producing lusher, darker vegetation, while buried walls or compacted ground can stunt growth. The result is a pattern readable from altitude but invisible at ground level. The Cloghaderreen enclosure measures roughly 74 metres on its northeast to southwest axis and 48 metres across, making it a substantial feature by any measure. It sits approximately 380 metres southwest of the townland boundary with Race. Subsequent imagery has confirmed it consistently: it appears on an Ordnance Survey orthophoto taken between 2005 and 2012, on a Digital Globe orthoimage from 2011 to 2013, and again on a Google Earth image captured on 18 November 2018. The record was compiled by Alison McQueen and Vera Rahilly and uploaded to the Archaeological Survey of Ireland database in October 2020. What function the enclosure once served, and when it was built or used, remains unrecorded.
For anyone curious enough to seek it out, the site lies in private farmland with no public access path or waymarker. The field itself offers no visible surface trace; the enclosure reveals itself only under specific conditions when differential plant growth makes the buried outline legible from above. Aerial imagery services such as Google Earth remain the most practical way to observe the feature, and late summer or early autumn, when moisture stress on vegetation is at its peak, tends to produce the clearest cropmark signatures. The 2002 ASI photographs and the 2018 Google Earth orthoimage, both referenced in the survey record, give the clearest sense of the enclosure's scale and shape.