Earthwork, Lissard, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Ritual/Ceremonial
In a field of reclaimed pasture in County Limerick, there is an earthwork that managed to escape the notice of the first Ordnance Survey cartographers entirely.
The six-inch maps produced around 1840 make no mention of it. Yet there it sits, a low oval platform roughly thirty metres north to south and twenty-seven metres east to west, defined by a scarp and the faint remnants of an outer fosse, the shallow ditch that once ran around its eastern, southern, and western sides.
The monument first appeared in the official cartographic record on the 1897 edition of the Ordnance Survey twenty-five-inch map, where it was noted as a raised sub-circular area defined by a scarp. Why it was omitted from the earlier survey is unclear, though it would not have been the only earthwork in rural Ireland to slip past mid-nineteenth-century field teams, particularly in areas where agricultural improvement had already softened the visible traces. The site lies about seventy metres north of the townland boundary with Castlecreagh, with Glenefy House standing roughly three hundred metres to the southeast. An oblique aerial photograph taken in October 2002, recorded as ASIAP (318) 36, shows the platform clearly, though its northern edge had already been truncated by a field boundary running northeast to southwest. A Google Earth orthoimage from September 2019 confirms both the platform and the surviving fosse traces to the east, south, and west, along with a drain cutting across the southeastern side.
The earthwork sits on private agricultural land, and there is no formal public access. The platform itself is not dramatic in the way that a large ringfort or motte might be, the scarp being relatively subtle and the overall form only fully legible from above. Anyone with access to aerial imagery will find the 2019 Google Earth orthoimage the most useful way to appreciate its shape. On the ground, approaching from the surrounding pasture on a dry day when the grass is low, the slight rise of the platform and the depression of the fosse become more readable, particularly along the eastern arc where the earthwork is best preserved.