Enclosure, Ballynamona, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Enclosures
In a patch of improved pasture in County Limerick, there is a roughly oval earthwork that does not appear on any Ordnance Survey historic map.
It was not recorded on the ground or noted by cartographers; it only came to light from the air, when a survey plane passed over the area in 1986 and caught something in the field that nobody had formally noticed before. That ambiguity has followed the site ever since. What looks from above like a suboval earthwork may, on closer examination, be little more than a natural rock outcrop. The monument, if it is one, sits in a state of quiet uncertainty.
The Bruff aerial photographic survey of 1986, reference Bruff 223, was the first to flag the feature as a possible enclosure, describing it as a suboval-shaped earthwork immediately east of a field boundary running roughly north to south. Subsequent satellite and ortho imagery, including OSi orthoimages taken between 2005 and 2012, a Digital Globe image from 2011 to 2013, and a Google Earth image from June 2018, all returned a similar picture: a poorly defined, irregular-shaped area measuring approximately 37 metres north to south and 36 metres east to west, consistent with either a man-made enclosure or a natural outcrop of rock. Enclosures of this kind, when genuine, are typically early medieval in origin, used as farmsteads or for keeping livestock, but this one has not been confirmed either way. The record was compiled by Alison McQueen and Vera Rahilly and uploaded to the national monuments database in November 2020. Nearby, around 360 metres to the south-west, lie the remains of Ballynamona castle and church, which suggest that this corner of Limerick was, at some point, a place of some local consequence.
The site lies roughly 90 metres north-east of the R513 and about 130 metres south-east of the Ballynamona River. Access would be across private farmland, so any visit would require the landowner's permission. Because the feature is so poorly defined at ground level, it is genuinely easier to appreciate in aerial imagery than in person. Those interested in the broader landscape might find more reward in locating the castle and church ruins to the south-west, which at least offer something tangible to orient around. The enclosure itself is the kind of site that matters more to the record than to the eye.