Cultivation ridges, Ballygrennan, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Ritual/Ceremonial
A gas pipeline survey is not the most romantic way to rediscover a medieval landscape, yet that is precisely how this cluster of fields in Ballygrennan came back to light.
Aerial photographs taken on 3 November 1984 for Bord Gáis Éireann revealed a series of small, adjoining, roughly square fields set out in a pattern that no Ordnance Survey historic map had ever recorded. The cultivation ridges visible within this field system, the low parallel earthen banks thrown up by generations of farmers working the soil by hand or with a plough, had simply lain in pasture, unnoticed in the cartographic record, until a camera lens looking for pipeline routes happened to pass overhead.
The site's deeper biography only emerged after 2002, when topsoil-stripping connected to infrastructure works prompted a formal excavation led by Emmet Byrnes under licence 02E0368, running from 6 April to 17 September of that year. Across an area of roughly 100 by 30 metres, the dig uncovered charcoal-rich deposits, evidence of in situ burning, and a sequence of five distinct phases of activity, all pointing to medieval rural settlement. The earliest phase consisted of intercutting gullies and ditches forming a subrectangular enclosure, the kind of modest boundary work that would have defined a small working farm. Later features recorded across the wider field system include three corn-drying kilns, structures used to dry harvested grain before storage or milling, as well as a metalworking site, suggesting a community engaged in a range of agricultural and craft activities. Uregare Church stands about 300 metres to the south-west, a reminder that this was a functioning, inhabited landscape during the medieval period.
The site sits in pasture immediately north of the road marking the townland boundary with Goat Island, roughly 90 metres north-east of the boundary with Uregare. There is no formal access or visitor infrastructure, and the features are subtle at ground level; cultivation ridges tend to read more clearly from elevation or in low raking light during the winter months, when vegetation is short and shadows define the slight undulations of the ground. Anyone approaching should keep to field margins and be aware that this is agricultural land. The value here is less in what you can see with the naked eye and more in knowing what lies just beneath an ordinary-looking Limerick pasture.