Enclosure, Ballyloundash, Co. Limerick

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Ballyloundash, Co. Limerick

There is nothing to see at Ballyloundash.

At least, nothing you could point to from the ground. What occupies this patch of low-lying wet pasture in County Limerick is an enclosure that has been levelled entirely into the soil, surviving only as a ghost of itself, legible to cameras looking down from the air but invisible to anyone standing in the field. That particular quality, a monument you can only read from altitude, gives it an odd kind of existence, hovering between erasure and record.

The enclosure measures roughly 45 metres east-northeast to west-southwest and 31 metres north-northwest to south-southeast, with a notably curvilinear corner at the northeast. Enclosures of this type are among the most common archaeological features in the Irish landscape; they typically functioned as defined boundaries around a settlement, farmstead, or activity area, though without excavation their precise date and purpose remain open. What makes this one traceable is the phenomenon of cropmarking, where buried features affect how overlying crops or grass grow, creating patterns of differential colour or growth that show up clearly in aerial photographs. The monument first came to professional attention during the Bruff aerial photographic survey in 1986, recorded as survey image Bruff 190, AP 4/3609. Significantly, the same subrectangular shape had already been mapped, as an ordinary field to the rear of a farmyard, on the Ordnance Survey Ireland 25-inch edition of 1897. A second enclosure, recorded separately, lies approximately 45 metres to the northwest. The site sits about 200 metres east of a public road and 450 metres east of the townland boundary with Ballinard, in ground that is cut through by land drains and watercourses.

For anyone wishing to locate it, the most useful tools are digital rather than physical. The cropmark is clearly visible on OSi orthoimagery captured between 2005 and 2012, and also appears on Digital Globe imagery from 2011 to 2013 and on a Google Earth image dated 20 March 2018. On the ground, the surrounding terrain is low-lying and wet, the kind of pasture that makes for difficult walking in wet months. There is nothing to mark the spot, no signage, no boundary. The site is, in every practical sense, a field.

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