Earthwork, Gotoon (Coshlea By.), Co. Limerick

Co. Limerick |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Earthwork, Gotoon (Coshlea By.), Co. Limerick

A low, rectangular platform sitting in a field in County Limerick is easy to dismiss as a quirk of the pasture, but the ground here holds the ghost of something considerably more substantial.

The raised earthwork, lying roughly fifty metres west of the townland boundary with Millmount, is all that visibly survives above ground of what was once Millmount Castle, a structure whose own remains have long since been levelled. What you are looking at is not the castle itself but probably the enclosure that surrounded it, a bawn, which in the Irish context refers to a defensive walled or embanked courtyard attached to a tower house or castle, designed to protect livestock and provide a first line of fortification.

The 1897 edition of the Ordnance Survey Ireland 25-inch map recorded the earthwork as a raised, sub-rectangular platform measuring approximately 33 metres along its northeast to southwest axis and 15 metres across. Even by that date, the northern portion had already been clipped by a railway line running in the same northeast to southwest direction, meaning the full original extent of the enclosure is unlikely ever to be recovered. The castle that stood at the centre of this earthwork is catalogued separately in the archaeological record, though nothing of it remains above the surface today. A faint linear cropmark, visible on Google Earth aerial imagery, runs in the same northeast to southwest alignment and hints at buried structural remains beneath the pasture.

The site is in private farmland, so access would require the landowner's permission. There is nothing dramatic to see at ground level; the platform is subtle and requires some patience to read in the landscape. The cropmark, which appears as a slight variation in vegetation growth caused by buried stonework or ditches affecting soil moisture, is best appreciated through the aerial imagery rather than on foot. Visiting in late summer, when crop and grass growth can exaggerate such variations, might reward the observant eye, though the field here is pasture rather than tillage, which limits how clearly such features emerge in person.

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Pete F
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