Earthwork, Dromacummer East, Co. Limerick

Co. Limerick |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Earthwork, Dromacummer East, Co. Limerick

A D-shaped shadow in a field beside the River Maigue is not much to look at from the road, but from the air, or on a dry late-summer afternoon when the grass grows unevenly over buried features, a clear cropmark resolves itself into the outline of something considerably older than the drainage ditches and field boundaries that now cut across it.

The monument sits in reclaimed pasture just 40 metres west of the Maigue and 80 metres northwest of a watercourse marking the townland boundary with Knockfenora, with a fording point on the river only 125 metres to the north. That proximity to a crossing point is unlikely to be coincidental.

The Ordnance Survey recorded it on the six-inch map of 1840 as a raised circular area roughly 60 metres in diameter, and the Ordnance Survey Field Name Books for Bruree Parish noted it as one of two ancient forts in Dromacummer East, the other lying towards the central part of the townland. By the time the 25-inch edition was published in 1897, the monument had been partially levelled, and its surveyors recorded a raised semi-circular shape measuring approximately 65 metres north to south and 55 metres east to west, its eastern and southern edges already cut away by field boundaries that post-date 1700. An earthwork of this kind, a broad raised platform defined by a surrounding fosse, which is simply a ditch dug to define or defend a perimeter, belongs to a class of enclosure associated across Ireland with early medieval settlement, though the site has not been excavated and its precise date and function remain unconfirmed.

More recent aerial imagery tells its own story. An Ordnance Survey Ireland orthophoto from between 2005 and 2012 shows the monument as a roughly oval area, approximately 62 metres northeast to southwest and 47 metres northwest to southeast, with the fosse still legible on the ground. A Digital Globe image from 2011 to 2013 shows the outline clearly, and a Google Earth image from September 2020 captures it as a D-shaped cropmark, the telltale differential growth of crops or grass over buried soil and stone. The site is on private farmland, so any visit would require permission from the landowner, and the earthwork itself is most legible not from ground level but in satellite and aerial imagery, where the cumulative distortions of centuries of farming suddenly clarify into a coherent shape.

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