Enclosure, Rathmore North, Co. Limerick

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Rathmore North, Co. Limerick

Some ancient monuments announce themselves with drama.

This one, a sub-rectangular earthwork in the flat pastureland of Rathmore North in County Limerick, does almost the opposite. It does not appear on Ordnance Survey historic maps. It vanishes entirely from Google Earth imagery taken in 2006, 2016, and 2018. Even the more detailed OSi orthoimages from 2005 to 2012 show nothing. The enclosure exists, officially, because of a single aerial survey conducted in 1986, and because a later set of Digital Globe images, captured between 2011 and 2013, caught the faintest suggestion of it. Archaeology of this kind, visible only under specific conditions of light, crop growth, or soil moisture, is sometimes called a cropmark or soilmark site, where buried features show themselves briefly on the land's surface before disappearing again.

The 1986 survey, part of the Bruff aerial photographic programme, recorded the site as reference Bruff 75 (AP 4/3647). What it revealed was a sub-rectangular enclosure orientated roughly north-east to south-west, measuring approximately 45 metres along that axis and 30 metres across. An enclosure of this kind, a defined area bounded by a bank, ditch, or wall, could serve any number of purposes depending on its date and context, from early medieval farmstead to something considerably older. The notes compiled by Edmond O'Donovan, uploaded to the record in October 2020, do not assign it a period, and no excavation appears to have taken place. What is notable, though, is the company it keeps: a standing stone lies 225 metres to the north-north-east, and a ring-barrow, a circular earthen mound typically associated with Bronze Age burial, sits 365 metres to the south-west. The site sits 40 metres south-west of the townland boundary with Cloghnamanagh, and roughly 825 metres north-west of the Morningstar River.

There is no formal public access to the field in which the enclosure sits, and given that the earthworks are invisible at ground level under most conditions, a visit requires some preparation. The Bruff survey image remains the clearest documentation of the site's shape and orientation. Anyone with a serious interest in the wider landscape might find more reward in locating the standing stone to the north-north-east, which at least has a physical presence above ground. The area around Bruff has a relatively dense scatter of prehistoric and early historic monuments, and this enclosure, elusive as it is, adds one more quiet layer to that record.

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