Concentric enclosure, Dromeliagh, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Enclosures
What draws attention to this site in Dromeliagh is not its scale but its geometry.
Set into poorly drained pasture in County Limerick, the monument presents itself as two concentric rings pressed into the earth, one inside the other, each describing roughly the same centre point. That kind of deliberate doubling is not what you expect to find when walking across a lumpy, wet field in the Irish midlands.
The inner element is a roughly circular enclosure, measuring approximately 27 metres east to west and 24 metres north to south. Its edge takes the form of a scarped profile, meaning the ground has been cut and shaped to create a defined lip rather than simply mounded up, and this is accompanied by an external fosse, essentially a ditch, running around the outside at a width of around 2.8 metres. Concentric with this fosse, and set about 8 metres further out, is a second, much lower earthen bank, which survives at an internal height of roughly 0.4 metres. The relationship between the two rings, the inner enclosure with its scarp and ditch, and the outer bank encircling both, is what gives the site its classification. Exactly what the enclosure was used for is not recorded in the survey notes compiled by Denis Power and uploaded in June 2013, and the monument type itself covers a range of possible functions across different periods of Irish prehistory and early medieval settlement.
A modern field boundary bisects the site from the west-southwest, running northwest to southeast, and this has done real damage to the legibility of both rings. The outer bank can be traced from the south, where the field boundary clips it, clockwise around to the east, but the southwestern arc is largely lost. The area of the enclosure lying southwest of the boundary has also been colonised by scrub, which obscures the ground further. The site does benefit from reasonable views to the north and east across the surrounding landscape, which may or may not have been relevant to whoever built it. Visitors approaching from those directions stand the best chance of reading the earthworks clearly, particularly in low winter light when vegetation is at its thinnest and the shallow relief of the banks casts longer shadows across the grass.
