Earthwork, Limerick City, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Ritual/Ceremonial
On a 1938 edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of Limerick City, a small mound is marked with hachures, the cartographic shorthand of short radiating lines used to indicate raised ground or earthworks, and annotated with a double identity: "Castle Blake or Farranshone (Site of)".
That parenthetical, that quiet admission of absence, is doing a lot of work. Whatever once stood here had already been reduced, by the late 1930s, to a bump in the ground worthy of note but not of much else.
The annotation links the earthwork to Castle Blake, a structure whose name suggests a fortified tower or fortified house associated with the Blake family, one of the notable merchant and landowning surnames found across Connacht and Munster in the late medieval and early modern periods. The dual placename, Castle Blake or Farranshone, points to the way Irish townland names and anglicised proprietorial names often competed on official maps, with surveyors recording both rather than settling the question. The site carries the Archaeological Survey reference LI005-006002-, compiled by Caimin O'Brien and uploaded in November 2019, which places it formally within the record of known or probable monuments even where physical evidence is minimal.
The difficulty for a visitor today is straightforward: modern housing now occupies the area marked on the 1938 map. The earthwork or mound, whatever its original dimensions, has not survived into the present streetscape in any form that can be easily identified on the ground. What remains is essentially cartographic, a ghost preserved in a mid-twentieth-century survey sheet rather than in soil and stone. For anyone interested in how urban expansion has absorbed and erased earlier layers of occupation, the comparison between the 1938 OS map and the current satellite view of the area makes the point more vividly than any standing structure could. The map itself is freely accessible through the OSi historical mapping viewer, and the Archaeological Survey entry provides the formal coordinates for anyone wanting to locate the approximate spot within the modern street grid.