Earthwork, Kilcurly (Kenry By.), Co. Limerick

Co. Limerick |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Earthwork, Kilcurly (Kenry By.), Co. Limerick

A faint square pressed into a field in the townland of Kilcurly, County Limerick, is all that may remain of a seventeenth-century settlement that once included a substantial dwelling house, ten cottages, and a salmon weir on a local waterway.

The earthwork is poorly preserved, visible in aerial photography rather than easily legible on the ground, and its precise connection to the people and buildings recorded in the documentary record has never been firmly established. That uncertainty is part of what makes it interesting: this is a place where history and landscape overlap without quite aligning.

The paper trail begins with two mid-seventeenth-century surveys conducted in the wake of the Cromwellian wars. The 1654 to 1656 Civil Survey of Limerick recorded that on the lands of a John Lissaght of Kilcurly there stood 'one good dwelling house, ten Cottages, and one Salmon weare seate upon it.' A few years later, the Down Survey map of Kenry Barony, drawn in 1657 and held at the National Library of Ireland as MS 718, depicted the medieval chapel of Kilkerill, known in Irish as Cill Choireallaigh, with a substantial dwelling to its south-west and a second building further south. Whether those mapped buildings and the Civil Survey description refer to the same structures is not certain, but the coincidence of detail is suggestive. The Down Survey was a large-scale mapping project commissioned under Cromwell to facilitate the redistribution of Irish land, so its depictions of individual properties, while schematic, were drawn with an administrative purpose and carry some evidential weight. It is also unclear whether Lissaght's ten cottages were clustered around the main house or scattered more broadly across the townland.

Visitors looking for visible remains will need patience and low expectations of drama. The roughly square earthwork thought to represent a possible house site lies in a field to the south of a separate enclosure near the chapel, and is most legible from aerial imagery, such as the Google Earth photographs taken in February 2009 that informed the archaeological record compiled by Caimin O'Brien. The chapel itself, recorded separately in the Sites and Monuments Register, provides the clearest landmark for orientation. Earthworks to the south-west of the chapel and in the field to its north are also candidates for the dwelling shown on the Down Survey map, meaning there are in effect several possible locations to consider within a relatively small area. A quiet, unhurried visit, ideally combined with a look at the Down Survey map reproduced online through the NLI, gives the best chance of reading the landscape for what it may once have contained.

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