Enclosure, Boherygeela, Co. Limerick

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Boherygeela, Co. Limerick

In a flat field in County Limerick, a circle roughly 22 metres across exists without ever having appeared on a historic Ordnance Survey map.

It leaves no visible mark on the ground for the casual passer-by, no earthwork, no stone, no obvious depression. The only evidence of it is a cropmark, the kind of faint signature that buried or long-vanished features leave in the growth patterns of grass or grain when seen from above, particularly in dry summers when soil moisture varies subtly over hidden ditches or walls beneath the surface. This one came to light not through a dedicated archaeological survey but as a by-product of infrastructure planning, spotted in aerial photographs commissioned ahead of the construction of the Bórd Gáis Éireann Curraleigh West-Limerick gas pipeline.

The enclosure sits in pasture approximately 220 metres south-east of the Camoge River, and was identified by researcher Fiona Rooney through examination of aerial photographs at two different scales, an OSi 1/10,000 image and a BGE 1/5,000 image, both taken before pipeline construction. It also shows up on OSi orthophotographs from between 2005 and 2012, and on Google Earth images from March 2017 and September 2020. The circular cropmark is transected at its north-east edge by a linear feature, which may suggest a later boundary or track cutting across an earlier structure. Roughly 210 metres to the north-north-west sits Greybridge House, and the rectilinear field system surrounding the enclosure appears to radiate outward from that building, raising the possibility that the fields and the enclosure are broadly contemporary with one another, though that relationship remains tentative.

Because the enclosure is a cropmark feature in private agricultural land, there is nothing for a visitor to observe at ground level. The most productive way to examine it is through the aerial and satellite imagery already in the public record, including the Google Earth orthoimages referenced in the site record. If you are in the area, the Camoge River corridor offers its own quiet interest, and Greybridge House can be located on modern mapping. The cropmark itself is most likely to be legible in satellite or aerial imagery taken during dry spells in late spring or summer, when differential crop growth above buried features tends to be sharpest.

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