Enclosure, Rathmore North, Co. Limerick

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Rathmore North, Co. Limerick

A circular earthwork roughly 43 metres across sits in low-lying pasture in Rathmore North, Co. Limerick, and almost nothing about it appears on any historical map.

No cartographer thought to record it, no surveyor left a note. It exists, quietly and without annotation, in a field crossed by land drains and watercourses, visible only from the air as a faint ring pressed into the ground.

The monument came to wider attention not through archaeological excavation but through aerial photography commissioned during the construction of the Bórd Gáis Éireann Curraghleigh to West-Limerick gas pipeline. On aerial photograph number 2497 from that survey, taken at a scale of 1:5000, the circular earthwork appears clearly enough to be recorded. Subsequent orthoimage surveys, including those carried out by Ordnance Survey Ireland between 2005 and 2012, by Digital Globe between 2011 and 2013, and by Google Earth on 16 March 2016, confirmed its presence. The enclosure sits roughly 360 metres east of the townland boundary with Lacka, and it is not alone in the landscape: a related enclosure lies approximately 35 metres to the north-east, and a ring-barrow, a low circular mound typically associated with burial in the prehistoric or early medieval period, lies around 150 metres further in the same direction. The record was compiled by Alison McQueen and Vera Rahilly and uploaded in November 2020.

There is no visitor infrastructure here, and the monument is not marked on standard maps. Anyone hoping to locate it would need to cross working farmland and should seek landowner permission first. The earthwork itself is subtle at ground level; the drains and watercourses that cut through the pasture make the terrain uneven underfoot, and in wet months the low-lying ground holds water. What the site rewards, perhaps more than a physical visit, is the exercise of looking at aerial imagery and learning to read the land's faint geometry, the way a buried or eroded structure can still declare itself, given the right angle of light and the right season of year.

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Pete F
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