Designed landscape - tree-ring, Moymore, Co. Limerick

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Designed Landscapes

Designed landscape – tree-ring, Moymore, Co. Limerick

A circular earthwork sitting quietly in improved pasture in Moymore, County Limerick, presents a small puzzle of landscape history.

The structure looks, at first glance, like the kind of low-profile ringfort that dots the Irish countryside, but the cartographic record tells a more complicated story. When the Ordnance Survey mapped this area in 1840, the circle was recorded not as an antiquity but simply as a tree-plantation, and the revised 1897 edition confirms it as a tree-planted enclosure. The trees are long gone, but the earthwork beneath them remains, sitting on a small hillock on an east-facing slope, about twelve metres east of the townland boundary with Pallashill.

The underlying monument was first formally described by O'Dwyer in 1959, who noted a platform structure roughly 16.5 metres in diameter with evidence of a bank at its edge and a ditch that had largely silted up on the western side. He also identified a low mound of about 5.5 metres in diameter on the northeast quadrant, which he interpreted as a probable hut-site. When the Archaeological Survey of Ireland revisited and surveyed the site in 2008, they found a low circular area of about 14 metres in diameter, defined by a scarp, a shallow intervening fosse (a narrow ditch between earthwork elements), and the remains of an outer bank. A possible entrance, roughly 4.5 metres wide, was identified on the west-southwest to west side, where the scarp is absent. The interior is grass-covered and uneven, and aerial imagery taken between 2005 and 2018 shows the whole feature as a circular cropmark with an overall diameter of around 19 metres. The cartographic evidence points to a tree-ring of post-1700 date, likely planted as part of a designed or managed landscape rather than as a survival of any ancient enclosure.

The site sits in a roadside field in the northwest corner, which means it is visible, at least in outline, from the road. Aerial orthoimages have been the most revealing tool for reading the full extent of the circular cropmark, so it is worth consulting Google Earth or OSi maps before visiting to orient yourself to what you are looking for on the ground. The earthwork itself is subtle: the scarp reaches only about 0.15 metres in height, and the outer bank is barely more pronounced. The steep exterior drop on the northeast to north-northeast side is the most legible feature when walking the perimeter. This is a site that rewards patience and a certain tolerance for ambiguity, where a post-medieval planting scheme has settled itself over, or around, something that may be considerably older.

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