Enclosure, Boherygeela, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Enclosures
There is a field in Boherygeela, County Limerick, that contains the ghost of a structure nobody has ever fully seen.
No walls survive, no earthworks protrude above the soil, and the site does not appear on any of the Ordnance Survey's historic maps. What exists instead is a cropmark, the faint sub-rectangular shadow of something buried, visible only under very particular conditions from very high above.
The enclosure came to light not through excavation or local tradition but through a set of aerial photographs taken on 3 November 1984, during survey work associated with the Bord Gáis Éireann Curraghleigh to Limerick pipeline project. Aerial survey at that scale, 1:5000, can reveal features that ground-level inspection entirely misses. Cropmarks form when buried features, ditches, walls, or disturbed ground, affect the moisture available to crops or grass above them, causing differential growth that becomes legible from the air. The site is recorded as sitting approximately 135 metres north of a separate rectangular enclosure already on record (LI031-067). Its own outline, measuring roughly 43 metres east to west and 56 metres north to south, reappeared decades later as a faint trace on an Ordnance Survey orthophotograph taken sometime between 2005 and 2012, confirming it had not been a photographic accident. It does not show up on Google Earth imagery, which suggests the conditions required to make it visible are narrow and inconsistent.
The land is described as reclaimed pasture, which means the surface gives little away. There is nothing here to find with the naked eye at ground level, and the site carries no public access infrastructure. For anyone with a serious interest, the aerial photograph reference, BGE 1/5000 No. 2503, and the record compiled by Fiona Rooney and uploaded to the national monuments database in March 2021, are the primary starting points. What the enclosure actually was, its age, its purpose, and its relationship to the neighbouring site to the south, remains unresolved. It is, in the most literal sense, a mark on the land that has not yet been read.