Enclosure, Caheranardrish, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Enclosures
Some sites make it onto the archaeological record not because anyone dug them up, but because a shadow in a photograph suggested something might be there.
In a pasture in Caheranardrish, County Limerick, there is a roughly circular feature, somewhere between fifteen and twenty metres across, that has never been confirmed as anything at all. It does not appear on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1840, nor on the more detailed twenty-five-inch map of 1897. It sits in the record under the careful designation of "doubtful antiquity," which is the archaeological equivalent of a raised eyebrow.
The feature was identified by Celie O'Rahilly, an archaeologist with Limerick Corporation, through examination of aerial photographs, specifically OSi images 1097 and 1098. What she spotted, approximately 130 metres east of a gas pipeline and about twenty metres west of the townland boundary with Camheen, looked like a possible enclosure. Enclosures of this kind, when genuine, are often the remains of a ringfort or cashel, a type of early medieval farmstead enclosed by an earthen bank or stone wall, used across Ireland roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. But the operative word here is "possible." The site was compiled into the record by Martin Fitzpatrick and uploaded in June 2020, and as of a Google Earth image taken in September 2019, the relevant area shows up as an irregular, tree-covered shape, which may or may not correspond to anything buried beneath.
There is no visitor infrastructure here, and nothing visible at ground level that would draw the eye. The site sits in working pasture, and access would require landowner permission. For those with an interest in how archaeology actually functions, rather than just what it finds, there is something instructive about a place like this. Much of what ends up in the Sites and Monuments Record begins exactly this way, as a smudge on an aerial photograph, a note in a database, a question that fieldwork has not yet answered. Whether this particular smudge ever resolves into something older than the landscape around it remains, for now, an open question.