Enclosure, Ballyloundash, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Enclosures
Somewhere beneath a field of pasture in County Limerick, a circular structure has been quietly pressing itself into the soil for centuries, invisible to anyone walking across it, yet legible from the air as a faint arc of discolouration in the grass.
This enclosure at Ballyloundash never made it onto the Ordnance Survey's historic maps, which means it slipped past generations of antiquarians and surveyors without notice. It was only when aerial photographs were examined that the outline began to emerge.
The monument was identified through analysis of imagery from the GSI Aerial Photographic collection, reference GSIAP R445, where it appears as an oval-shaped cropmark. Cropmarks form when buried archaeological features, walls, ditches, or banks, affect how vegetation grows above them. A filled ditch retains more moisture and nutrients, producing lusher, greener growth; a buried wall does the opposite. From altitude, these differences read as shapes. The Ballyloundash enclosure presents as a curved arc roughly fifty metres across, visible on Digital Globe orthoimages taken between 2011 and 2013, and again on Google Earth imagery captured in March 2018. A related enclosure, recorded separately in the Sites and Monuments Record as LI032-250, sits approximately thirty metres to the south-east, suggesting this corner of Limerick may have hosted a cluster of activity at some point in the past, though the dating of either feature is not established from the available records. The site was compiled by Alison McQueen and Vera Rahilly and uploaded to the record in November 2020.
The field lies around 410 metres east of the townland boundary with Ballinard, in ordinary agricultural pasture, and there is nothing on the surface to indicate what lies beneath. A visitor would see grass and, if the season and conditions are right, perhaps a barely perceptible difference in the colour or texture of the sward where the arc runs. The best time to look for cropmarks in Irish fields is during a dry summer, when moisture stress makes the differences in growth above buried features most pronounced. Approaching from the townland boundary and walking roughly eastward will bring you into the general area, though precise access would require engagement with the landowner. The monument itself is described as levelled, meaning any upstanding earthwork has long since been flattened, and the satisfaction here is largely conceptual: knowing that a structure once bounded this piece of ground, even if the only way to see it clearly is from a satellite image on a screen.