Enclosure, Ballyveloge, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Enclosures
A working farm driveway cuts straight through the middle of an ancient enclosure in Ballyveloge, Co. Limerick, which is perhaps as good an illustration as any of how the Irish countryside layers the very old beneath the very ordinary.
The enclosure, a roughly circular earthwork of the kind once used across early medieval Ireland for settlement or enclosing livestock, survives only partially, its banks overgrown and its outline interrupted by later field boundaries and the everyday traffic of a farmyard.
The monument was recorded as early as the 1840 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, where it appeared as an oval-shaped area approximately 43 metres across on a northwest-to-southeast axis, defined by a scarp, that is, a slope or cut in the ground marking the line of the original enclosing element. By the time the more detailed 25-inch OS map was produced in 1897, the same feature was described as sub-circular, with an interior diameter of around 30 metres east to west and an exterior of 43 metres, enclosed by a bank some 8 metres wide. Even then, the southern and south-western portion of the bank had been absorbed into a post-1700 field boundary, meaning the enclosure had already been quietly cannibalised by later agricultural organisation before the Victorian surveyors arrived. The site sits on a slight east-facing slope in pasture, roughly 200 metres south of a second enclosure recorded nearby, suggesting this was once a landscape with more going on than the current fields imply. The record was compiled by Fiona Rooney and uploaded to the national monuments database in June 2020.
A Google Earth image from 2019 confirms that remnants are still legible from above, showing the overgrown enclosing element curving from north through east to south, with the field boundary continuing its line around the south-western and western arc. On the ground, though, this is not a site that announces itself. The driveway bisects it heading north towards the farmyard, and what remains of the bank is likely to read as little more than a grassy rise or a thickened hedgerow to anyone not specifically looking. The surrounding pasture is in agricultural use, so access would require landowner permission. Early morning light from the east, falling across a slope that faces that direction, offers the best conditions for picking out any earthwork relief that survives.