Earthwork, Bulgadenhall, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Ritual/Ceremonial
Tucked inside the walled garden of a County Limerick country house, an ancient earthwork quietly goes about the business of being overlooked.
The monument sits just forty-five metres north of Bulgaden Hall itself, and were it not for a sub-circular scarp and a curving field boundary that together describe its outline, it might pass entirely without notice beneath its covering of scrub vegetation. Walled gardens, typically associated with kitchen produce and ornamental planting, are not the obvious setting for medieval earthworks, which makes the combination here rather an odd one.
The earliest Ordnance Survey mapping of the area, the six-inch edition surveyed around 1840, makes no mention of the earthwork at all. It appears for the first time on the twenty-five-inch edition of 1897, recorded as a sub-circular shape defined by a scarp running from the north, around to the east and south-east, with a curving field boundary completing the enclosure from the south, west, and back to the north. The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp visited and described the site in a paper published between 1916 and 1917, characterising it as a small low mote. A mote, or motte, is the raised mound of compacted earth that formed the central defensive element of an early medieval fortification, typically topped with a timber tower and surrounded by an enclosed yard known as a bailey. Westropp's description suggests the earthwork is the diminished remains of such a structure, though its low profile means it reads more as a gentle rise than a commanding fortification. Aerial photographs held by the Aerial Survey Ireland archive, taken in January 2003, and orthophotographs captured between 2005 and 2012, confirm that scrub vegetation had by then colonised the monument, obscuring its form from ground level while still legible from above.
Bulgaden Hall is a private estate, and the earthwork lies within its walled garden, so access is not straightforward. The site is not signposted or managed as a public amenity. Those with a particular interest in earthwork archaeology may find the aerial imagery available through the Ordnance Survey Ireland orthophotograph archive and Google Earth a useful substitute for a visit, given that the scrub cover makes the monument difficult to read on the ground in any case. The 1897 twenty-five-inch Ordnance Survey map, available digitally through the OSi historic map viewer, gives the clearest historical picture of the earthwork's shape and relationship to the hall to its south.