Earthwork, Curraghturk, Co. Limerick

Co. Limerick |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Earthwork, Curraghturk, Co. Limerick

In a field of reclaimed pasture in County Limerick, sitting twenty metres west of the townland boundary with Ballyfauskeen, there is an earthwork that has never quite made up its mind about what shape it wants to be.

The Ordnance Survey recorded it as circular in 1840. By 1897 it had become, at least on paper, an oval. Aerial photography taken in 2003 brought back the circle. A cropmark visible from satellite imagery in 2021 confirmed it again. What this slight shapeshifting actually reflects is not the monument changing, but successive observers and mapping technologies catching different aspects of a structure that has been quietly subsiding into agricultural land for well over a century.

The earthwork sits in what is now ordinary grazing ground, though the landscape around it carries older layers. A barrow, the kind of low burial mound raised in prehistoric or early medieval times over the remains of the dead, lies just forty-five metres to the south-east, suggesting this corner of Curraghturk held some significance to earlier communities. The earthwork itself was recorded by the 1840 six-inch Ordnance Survey map as a circular enclosure, and the 1897 twenty-five-inch edition showed a raised, oval-shaped area roughly twenty-five metres across its longest axis, defined by a scarp, which is essentially a steep slope or edge marking where the ground level changes. Later aerial analysis, including an oblique photograph taken in January 2003, identified not just that scarp but also an external fosse, meaning a ditch running around the outside of the raised area. Subsequent satellite imagery has suggested the possible presence of an external bank visible along several compass arcs. The record was compiled by Martin Fitzpatrick and uploaded in October 2021.

The monument is not signposted and sits on private farmland, so access would require local enquiry and permission from the landowner. Those with an interest in reading earthworks from above, rather than on foot, will find the Google Earth orthoimages dated September 2019 and June 2021 worth examining alongside the aerial photograph reference ASIAP (341) 21. The cropmark is most legible in dry summer conditions when differential soil moisture picks out buried or disturbed ground in the growing vegetation above it. On the ground, the scarp edge is the most tangible feature remaining, a slight but deliberate rise in the pasture that marks where something was built, and has been slowly returning to the earth ever since.

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