Enclosure, Ballynanty Beg, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Enclosures
Somewhere beneath a mid-twentieth-century housing estate in Ballynanty Beg, on the northern edge of Limerick city, lies what was once a circular earthen enclosure, the kind of ancient feature that vanished not through neglect or the slow work of weather, but through a deliberate decision made in 1956 to clear the ground for new homes.
It is the sort of loss that barely registers in the historical record, yet it points to how much of Ireland's layered past was quietly erased during decades of post-war development.
The enclosure appeared on the Ordnance Survey six-inch first edition map, surveyed in 1840, as a single-banked circular enclosure, a form broadly associated with the ringfort tradition, in which a raised earthen bank would once have defined a domestic or agricultural space, typically dating to the early medieval period. By the time the OS returned to survey the same ground at twenty-five inches to the mile in 1897, the feature had changed in character, recorded now as a raised platform mound of approximately twenty-two metres in diameter, covered in scrub, with its outline indicated by a single row of hachures, the cartographic shorthand used to suggest a sloping edge. Investigations were carried out in 1956, prior to demolition, as part of the works connected with the construction of the surrounding housing scheme, according to a personal communication cited by researcher Jeffrey A. Tolbert.
There is, practically speaking, nothing to visit. The site itself no longer exists above ground, absorbed into the residential streets of Ballynanty Beg. What remains is cartographic: the two OS maps, separated by more than fifty years, recording the same feature in subtly different states, one as a functioning earthwork, the other as an overgrown mound already in decline. For anyone interested in how Irish archaeology intersects with urban expansion, those two map sheets, accessible through the OSI historic map viewer, are the closest thing to a visit that is now possible. The record compiled by Paul Walsh and uploaded to the national sites database in August 2015 preserves the outline of something that the ground itself no longer holds.