Enclosure, Boherygeela, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Enclosures
Some ancient monuments announce themselves clearly enough: a round tower, a dolmen, a stretch of mortared wall.
This one in Boherygeela, County Limerick, does the opposite. Standing in the reclaimed pasture where it lies, you would very likely see nothing at all. The enclosure exists now almost entirely as a ghost, its presence confirmed not by anything you could touch but by the faint differential colouring that parched grass betrays from the air, the buried outline of a sub-rectangular bank showing up as a cropmark on aerial photographs taken decades apart.
The monument sits immediately to the north-east of a concentric enclosure and south of a second enclosure, suggesting a cluster of related ancient features in this part of Limerick. It does not appear on the Ordnance Survey Ireland historic maps, which means it escaped cartographic notice entirely until aerial survey work brought it into focus. The earliest detailed description comes from O'Kelly, writing in 1943, who noted that the structure was then only just barely perceptible on the ground: a slight bank enclosing an open space, with its greatest overall dimension measured at 175 feet, or approximately 53 metres. By the time the Archaeological Survey of Ireland captured aerial photographs in September 2002, the sub-rectangular cropmark was clear enough to record formally. Subsequent orthophotos taken between 2005 and 2012, and Digital Globe satellite imagery from March 2013 and September 2020, all confirmed the trace, along with a linear cropmark that intersects the monument at its north-east corner, running roughly north-west to south-east. An enclosure of this kind would typically have defined a bounded space in the early medieval period, whether for settlement, agriculture, or the marking out of territory, though no specific function has been assigned to this one.
There is, practically speaking, very little for a ground-level visitor to see. The land is reclaimed pasture, privately held, and the bank described by O'Kelly as barely perceptible in 1943 has not grown more obvious in the decades since. The enclosure is best appreciated through the aerial and satellite imagery held by the Archaeological Survey of Ireland rather than through a visit to the field itself. If you do find yourself in the area and curious about the wider landscape of monuments here, the neighbouring concentric enclosure to the south-west is the more legible feature. Cropmark sites like this one are often best viewed in late summer, when dry conditions stress the grass unevenly over buried features, echoing precisely the conditions under which the September 2002 photograph was taken.