Enclosure, Gortnanuv, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Enclosures
On the north-facing slope of Knockseeefin in County Limerick, a prehistoric enclosure has spent the best part of two centuries hiding in plain sight, first mistaken for an ordinary field boundary and later erased from the record entirely.
It appears on the Ordnance Survey's 1840 six-inch map, but only as a hexagonal-shaped field, open to the west-southwest and bisected by a townland boundary. Nobody marked it as an antiquity. No subsequent map bothered with it at all. The site endured decades of agricultural activity and administrative indifference until aerial photography finally made visible what ground-level survey could not: a broad, suboval cropmark sitting quietly in the rough upland pasture, its outline betrayed by the differential growth of grass above its buried ditches.
When the archaeologist O'Dwyer visited and described the monument in 1959, there was still something to see, though not much. Writing in that year, he noted that a modern field fence cut straight through the centre of what he identified as a platform structure, an earthwork where the interior was raised above the surrounding ground, typically ringed by a bank and outer ditch. Platform enclosures of this kind are associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, though their precise function varies. O'Dwyer recorded that the eastern half had been so badly damaged that the edge of the platform and the outer ditch were barely discernible; to the west, faint traces of a bank and a possible counterscarp bank, a low secondary ridge on the outer side of the ditch, could still be made out. He estimated the original diameter of the platform at roughly 21 metres. By the time the Archaeological Survey of Ireland returned in 2008, that was all history: the survey recorded no surface remains whatsoever. The site sits in a notably busy archaeological landscape, with a second enclosure 190 metres to the southwest, a hilltop mound 97 metres to the north, and a mass-rock, a flat outdoor stone used for clandestine Catholic worship during the Penal Laws, just 65 metres to the northwest.
For those inclined to visit, the enclosure lies in rough upland pasture on the northern slope of Knockseeefin, 45 metres northwest of the townland boundary with Glen. There is nothing to see at ground level; the ASI survey of 2008 confirmed that conclusively. The aerial cropmark, visible on orthoimagery captured between 2005 and 2018, gives the clearest sense of the monument's suboval outline. Consulting the Google Earth imagery taken on 28 June 2018, or the profile drawing O'Dwyer made in 1959, offers more than any amount of walking the field. The surrounding area rewards attention for its density of monuments, and the mass-rock to the northwest is within easy reach on foot.