Enclosure, Ballynagarde, Co. Limerick

Co. Limerick |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Ballynagarde, Co. Limerick

An oval earthwork in the Limerick countryside near Ballynagarde was not discovered by anyone walking across a field or clearing back brambles.

It was spotted from the air. The enclosure only became known to the archaeological record through an aerial photograph taken as part of the Bruff Survey, catalogued on Map 22 as Bruff 69. That is a fairly common story for prehistoric earthworks in Ireland, where the full extent of ancient landscaping only becomes legible when seen from above, the buried ditches and banks casting faint shadows or producing crop marks that are invisible at ground level.

What the aerial photograph revealed, and what Doody described in 2008, is a platformed enclosure, meaning the interior ground surface is raised or levelled into a deliberate platform rather than simply enclosed. The structure measures 48 metres north to south and 28 metres east to west, making it a substantial oval. Around this platform runs a ditch roughly 4 metres wide, and beyond that a broad outer bank approximately 6 metres wide at its base and sitting about 0.3 metres above the bottom of the ditch. That combination of an internal platform with an encircling ditch and outer bank is what leads researchers to suggest a Bronze Age date, a period broadly spanning from around 2500 to 500 BC in Ireland, when communities constructed a range of enclosed spaces for purposes that likely included settlement, ceremony, and stock management, though distinguishing between these uses without excavation is rarely straightforward.

Because the enclosure was identified through aerial survey rather than ground investigation, access and visibility on the ground may be limited. The earthwork lies in agricultural land, and without excavation or dedicated conservation work, the banks and ditch may be heavily degraded or obscured by vegetation and field activity. Anyone interested in visiting should check current land access arrangements in advance, as the site sits on private farmland. The morphology, that particular combination of platform, ditch, and bank, is the real point of interest here, and understanding what you are looking at requires some familiarity with how these features read in the landscape. A low evening light can sometimes help pick out the subtle undulations that mark the outer bank, even where the earthwork has been reduced over centuries of ploughing.

Rated 0 out of 5

Visitor Notes

Review type for post source and places source type not found
Added by
Picture of Pete F
Pete F
IrishHistory.com is passionate about helping people discover and connect with the rich stories of their local communities.
Please use the form below to submit any photos you may have of Enclosure, Ballynagarde, Co. Limerick. We're happy to take any suggested edits you may have too. Please be advised it will take us some time to get to these submissions. Thank you.
Name
Email
Message
Upload images/documents
Maximum file size: 100 MB
If you'd like to add an image or a PDF please do it here.

Advertisement