Enclosure, Ballyreesode, Co. Limerick

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Ballyreesode, Co. Limerick

Some places survive best as absences.

In a field of reclaimed pasture in Ballyreesode, County Limerick, there is nothing to see at ground level, and yet aerial imagery reveals the ghost of a circular enclosure roughly 29 metres in diameter, its outline pressed faintly into the earth as a cropmark. The enclosure is gone in any physical sense, levelled sometime between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but the geometry of what once stood here refuses to vanish entirely.

The site was recorded on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1840, where it appeared as a circular area defined by a scarp, a low earthen or stone edge forming the perimeter of the enclosure. At its south-east, a possible lime kiln, a small stone-built structure used to burn limestone into agricultural lime, was constructed into the outer face of that scarp, suggesting the monument was already being put to practical use even as it survived in some form. A post-1700 field boundary running north to south cut across the eastern side, another sign that the enclosure had long since been absorbed into the working landscape around it. By the time the twenty-five-inch Ordnance Survey map was produced in 1897, the feature had disappeared from the record altogether, indicating it was levelled during the intervening decades. Aerial photographs taken between 2001 and 2012 show no surface trace, but Google Earth orthoimages captured since then reveal the faint cropmark that confirms the enclosure's approximate diameter and circular form. The site lies 63 metres east of the townland boundary with Ballybane, and around 70 metres south-west of a second enclosure recorded nearby. The record was compiled by Fiona Rooney and uploaded in April 2021.

There is little to observe on foot here. The surrounding land is reclaimed pasture with no upstanding earthworks, and the site is not marked or interpreted in any way on the ground. The cropmark is most legible from aerial imagery, particularly during dry summers when differential soil moisture causes buried features to show through variations in grass or crop growth. Anyone with a serious interest in the site would do well to consult the Google Earth orthoimages referenced in the Archaeological Survey of Ireland record before visiting, since the field itself offers almost no visual confirmation of what the aerial photographs suggest lies just beneath the surface.

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