Enclosure, Ballinard, Co. Limerick

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Ballinard, Co. Limerick

A field in south County Limerick holds an earthwork that does not appear on any historical Ordnance Survey map, meaning it passed entirely unrecorded by nineteenth-century cartographers and existed for decades, perhaps centuries, as nothing more than a slight rise in improved pasture.

It only entered the archaeological record in 1986, when the Bruff aerial photographic survey captured a crop or soil mark revealing a subrectangular enclosure in the north-west corner of a field near the village of Herbertstown.

What the aerial image showed, and what later satellite imagery has confirmed, is a roughly subrectangular area measuring approximately 50 metres east to west and 42 metres north to south. The enclosure is defined on its eastern and southern sides by a bank and fosse, the fosse being a ditch cut to throw up the bank material, while the western and northern sides follow an existing field boundary, suggesting those older earthworks were either absorbed into or aligned with later land divisions. More intriguing still is a circular earthwork visible within the interior, measuring roughly 23 metres north to south and 21 metres east to west, defined by its own fosse. This inner feature may represent an earlier phase of activity on the site, though its precise function and date remain unresolved. The site sits on the southern slope of a rocky knoll in the valley of the Camoge River, with the river itself lying about 830 metres to the west. Adding further archaeological weight to the immediate landscape, three cashels, which are dry-stone ringforts, lie within 100 metres to the north and north-east, making this a notably dense cluster of early settlement remains in a relatively small area.

The enclosure is located roughly 300 metres north of Herbertstown village and about 285 metres south-west of the townland boundary with Cloghaviller. Because the monument is set in working agricultural pasture and is not marked on standard maps, it requires some effort to locate. The earthworks are best appreciated from aerial imagery rather than ground level, where the bank and fosse can be subtle and easily read as ordinary field features. The record was compiled by Alison McQueen and Vera Rahilly and uploaded to the national monuments database in November 2020, so consulting that database before visiting will give access to the relevant orthoimages and the original Bruff survey photograph, reference Bruff 287, which remain the clearest guides to what survives.

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