Enclosure, Ballyveelish, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Enclosures
Something unusual is happening in this corner of County Limerick, though you would not immediately know it from the ground.
A roughly rectangular earthwork sits on a gentle west-facing slope in ordinary undulating pasture, its interior level and clear, its outline defined by a low scarp less than sixty centimetres high. Attached to its south-western corner is a smaller rectangular annex, also tree-lined, which lends the whole thing an oddly formal appearance when seen from above. What makes the site quietly unsettling is not the enclosure itself but its company: within a radius of two hundred metres, at least four ring-barrows cluster around it. Ring-barrows are low circular burial mounds, typically of prehistoric date, and finding several in such close proximity to a single enclosure suggests this patch of Limerick farmland was once a place of some deliberate significance.
The enclosure's recorded history is itself a small puzzle in shifting interpretations. When the Ordnance Survey mapped the area in 1840 for their six-inch series, the monument appeared as a large circular earthwork with a small subrectangular tree-planted annex to the south-west. By the time the revised twenty-five-inch map was produced in 1897, the same feature was being described as subrectangular rather than circular, with a corresponding subrectangular annex. Whether the monument changed, or whether the surveyors were simply seeing it differently, is not clear. The Archaeological Survey of Ireland visited in 2000 and recorded what they found on the ground: a slightly raised area measuring roughly 32 metres east to west and 28 metres north to south, bounded by a scarp approximately 1.85 metres wide, with a possible external fosse, which is a ditch dug around the outside of the earthwork as part of its original construction. A slight ramp in the scarp on the southern side is interpreted as the likely entrance. A field bank running along the northern, eastern, and southern sides, set about four metres out from the base of the scarp, may be obscuring whatever remains of that outer ditch.
The enclosure sits in private farmland, so access is not guaranteed and any visit should be arranged with appropriate courtesy to landowners. Aerial imagery from 2011 to 2018, including Google Earth orthoimages, confirms the tree-lined outline of both the main enclosure and its annex remain clearly visible from above, making this one of those sites that rewards looking at a map or satellite view before, or even instead of, walking the ground. The interior is described as level and free of overgrowth, which is relatively fortunate for an earthwork of this kind. The surrounding ring-barrows lie within easy sight of one another across the same gentle pasture, and taken together, the cluster repays careful attention to the landscape rather than to any single feature within it.