Enclosure, Anhid East, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Enclosures
A circular enclosure sitting quietly in a Limerick pasture, this site in Anhid East would almost certainly have remained unrecorded had it not been for the planning process surrounding a road scheme.
It does not appear on any Ordnance Survey historic maps, and nothing on the ground announces its presence to a passing eye. The site exists, as far as the archaeological record is concerned, almost entirely as a ghost in the grass.
The monument came to light when Celie O'Rahilly, Limerick County Archaeologist, examined aerial photography in advance of construction of the Croom bypass. What she identified were two concentric circular cropmarks, a pattern that indicates a bivallate enclosure, meaning one defined by two banks or ditches rather than one. Cropmarks of this kind appear when differences in buried soil and archaeology affect how surface vegetation grows, making features invisible at ground level suddenly legible from the air. The enclosure is described as a circular mound defined by a shallow ditch pressing against the northern boundary of a field, with an approximate north-south diameter of 36 metres. A small annexe is also visible to the south, a secondary enclosed space attached to the main circle, of the kind sometimes associated with Irish prehistoric and early medieval settlement sites. The monument sits in pasture roughly 455 metres south-west of the River Maigue and abuts the townland boundary between Anhid East and Anhid West. It was assessed as lying outside the route line of the bypass. Its presence has since been confirmed across multiple aerial surveys, including OSi orthoimages from 2005 to 2012, a Digital Globe orthophoto from 2011 to 2013, and Google Earth images captured in March 2017 and February 2020.
Because the enclosure is only visible from the air, a visit on foot offers little in the way of obvious archaeology. The land is in agricultural use, and there is no excavation report or interpretive material associated with the site. The value here is in knowing it exists: a buried circular structure, probably ancient, sitting in an ordinary field beside a townland boundary, revealed only by the way grass grows differently over disturbed ground.