Enclosure, Kilcullane, Co. Limerick

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Kilcullane, Co. Limerick

There is a circular enclosure in the townland of Kilcullane, County Limerick, that has never appeared on any historical Ordnance Survey map and is currently invisible beneath a canopy of forestry.

It exists, as far as the documentary record is concerned, almost entirely as a single aerial photograph taken in 1986, and it is the kind of monument that raises more questions than it answers.

The enclosure came to light through the Bruff aerial photographic survey, which catalogued the image as Bruff 222. At the time, the site appeared as a small, circular cropmark in the northern corner of a triangular field, roughly 335 metres west of the Camoge River, which itself serves as the boundary between the townlands of Kilcullane and Ballinscoola. Cropmarks of this kind form when buried archaeological features, such as the ditches or banks of an ancient enclosure, affect the growth of crops or vegetation above them, making the outline briefly visible from the air under the right conditions. Those conditions proved fleeting here. By the time aerial imagery was captured again in 2005 and 2006, forestry had been established across the area, and subsequent orthoimages taken between 2006 and 2018 show nothing at all; the trees have closed over it completely. The monument was compiled into the record by Alison McQueen and Vera Rahilly, with the entry uploaded in November 2020.

For anyone hoping to visit, the site presents a particular difficulty: it lies within a low-lying tract of forestry in the northern corner of that triangular field, and there is no indication from the ground, or from any satellite image taken since forestry establishment, that anything is there. The Camoge River offers a rough bearing, with the enclosure sitting approximately 335 metres to its west, but the plantation effectively renders the monument inaccessible in any meaningful sense. Its interest, for now at least, is archival rather than physical, a reminder that the archaeological record of the Irish midlands still holds features that are known only because someone happened to fly over on the right day, in the right season, decades ago.

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Pete F
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