Earthwork, Boolanlisheen, Co. Limerick

Co. Limerick |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Earthwork, Boolanlisheen, Co. Limerick

In a wet corner of County Limerick, where the Assaroola River quietly marks the boundary between the townlands of Boolanlisheen and Ballynamuddagh, a circular raised platform sits in open pasture, largely unremarked and half-swallowed by vegetation.

What makes it quietly arresting is not its size but its persistence: mapped, measured, and slowly absorbed by the landscape around it, it has survived drainage works, field boundary changes, and the encroachment of a forestry plantation to its immediate north-east, remaining visible, if only just, to anyone who knows to look.

The earthwork appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1840, already noted as a circular platform, and again on the 1897 twenty-five-inch edition, where it is recorded as a raised circular area of roughly 23 metres in diameter defined by a scarp, that is, a steep slope at the edge of the platform rather than a constructed wall. When the Archaeological Survey of Ireland examined it in 1999, they recorded a diameter of 24 metres, a scarp measuring 1.3 metres wide and 1.1 metres high, and a fosse, or surrounding ditch, averaging 2.2 metres in width. At the south-west, however, the fosse widens considerably to 8.6 metres, a detail the surveyors interpreted as a possible entrance feature, suggesting the earthwork was once a deliberate enclosure with a defined point of entry. A second enclosure site lies approximately 170 metres to the north. By the north-west, a possible drainage ditch running roughly north to south has truncated the monument, and a curving field boundary cuts across it from the north-east, the ordinary business of agricultural land management having left its mark over the centuries.

Accessing the site requires crossing wet pasture, so the ground conditions are worth bearing in mind, particularly in winter or after prolonged rain. The monument is partially overgrown and does not announce itself from a distance, but aerial imagery, including Google Earth orthoimages used in the 1999 survey and available to anyone today, gives a clearer sense of the platform's outline than a ground-level visit might. The related enclosure to the north is the more legible of the two features from the ground and may help orient a visitor approaching from that direction. There are no facilities or formal access arrangements recorded for the site.

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Pete F
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