Earthwork, Ballincurra, Co. Limerick

Co. Limerick |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Earthwork, Ballincurra, Co. Limerick

A low, roughly circular scar in a reclaimed pasture field in County Limerick is, depending on the season and the angle of light, either completely invisible or strikingly legible.

This earthwork at Ballincurra is no longer a mound in any meaningful physical sense; it has been levelled almost entirely out of existence, surviving now chiefly as a cropmark, the kind of ghost that only becomes visible from the air when differential moisture or growth in the soil betrays the outline of something that once stood above ground.

The feature sits around 80 metres west of the Ballincurra Stream, the watercourse that marks the townland boundary with Stookeens, and a second earthwork of the same type lies about 40 metres to the northwest, suggesting this corner of south Limerick may once have held a modest concentration of such structures. A platform or mound of roughly sub-circular shape, with a diameter of approximately 18 metres and defined by a scarp, a low escarpment formed by the edge of raised ground, was still recorded on the Ordnance Survey 25-inch map edition of 1897. Notably, it does not appear on the earlier 1840 six-inch edition of the same mapping series, which makes its precise origins and original function difficult to pin down without further investigation. By the time an oblique aerial photograph was taken in January 2003, the earthwork was still legible as a physical feature on the ground. Within a decade, however, satellite orthoimages taken between 2011 and 2013 by Digital Globe, and subsequently visible through Google Earth, showed it reduced to a cropmark, that faint discolouration in growing crops or grass that betrays buried or disturbed ground beneath the surface.

Accessing this particular site requires attention to its context rather than any dramatic landscape marker. The relevant field lies in ordinary reclaimed agricultural pasture, and the feature itself will not announce itself to someone walking nearby. The cropmark is most legible from aerial imagery rather than ground level, and the best way to appreciate what survives is to consult the Google Earth orthoimages or the oblique aerial photograph compiled as part of the Archaeological Survey of Ireland record, where the earthwork is marked as feature number 6. Visiting in late spring or early summer, when crop growth is most active, offers the best chance of seeing any surface variation from even a modest elevation, though the levelled state of the mound means that ground observation alone will likely yield little.

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