Enclosure, Ballyblake, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Enclosures
A field in County Limerick holds something that neither nineteenth-century mapmakers nor generations of farmers appear to have recorded: a wedge-shaped enclosure that exists, for the most part, only as a pattern pressed into the soil.
No earthwork rises above the pasture, no stone marks its outline. What remains is a cropmark, the faint differential growth of grass or grain over buried features that reveals itself from the air in ways entirely invisible to someone walking the ground.
The enclosure sits on a slight west-facing slope in the townland of Ballyblake, about 75 metres west of the boundary with Ballybricken South. It came to notice during the Bruff aerial photographic survey in 1986, when a flight recorded as Bruff 262 AP 4/3693 captured a curving cropmark joining two corners of a relic field, producing a roughly wedge-shaped enclosure measuring approximately 38 metres north to south and 17 metres east to west. What makes it quietly peculiar is its absence from all historic Ordnance Survey Ireland maps, suggesting it had already been reduced entirely to a subsurface trace before the nineteenth-century surveys were carried out. It reappears on the OSi orthoimage taken between 2005 and 2012, and is visible again on Google Earth images from April 2006 and June 2018, confirming that the buried feature persists. The site sits within a wider prehistoric landscape: two sets of ring-barrows, which are low circular burial mounds typically dating to the Bronze Age, lie 280 metres to the southwest and 210 metres to the northeast respectively, suggesting this part of Limerick was once considerably more populated with monuments than its present-day appearance implies.
There is nothing to see at ground level, which is rather the point. The enclosure is pasture land, and access would require landowner permission. Those with an interest in how aerial archaeology works could usefully compare the 1986 survey image with the more recent Google Earth orthoimages noted by Edmond O'Donovan, who compiled the site record in September 2020. The cropmark is most legible in dry summers, when vegetation stress picks out buried ditches or banks more sharply. For anyone curious about what lies beneath ordinary-looking Irish farmland, this site is a reasonable case study in how much can disappear from the surface record while leaving its outline encoded, patiently, in the earth below.