Enclosure, Cahirguillamore, Co. Limerick

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Cahirguillamore, Co. Limerick

A rectangular outline pressed into a former deer park in County Limerick is the kind of thing that only becomes visible from the air, and even then, only under the right conditions.

This enclosure, sitting within the demesne lands of Cahir Guillamore House, measures roughly 41 metres north to south and 29 metres east to west, and it does not appear on any Ordnance Survey Ireland historic maps. Whatever it was, it left no mark on the official cartographic record, which makes it the sort of anomaly that aerial survey was made for.

The site came to light during the Bruff aerial photographic survey of 1986, recorded as Bruff 42 (AP4/3598), when the outline of a roughly rectangular enclosure was captured from above. It sits in the north-western quadrant of a wider field system and lies approximately 40 metres north-west of a ring-barrow, a low circular earthwork typically associated with Bronze Age burial traditions. The enclosure itself is located around 375 metres south-west of Cahir Guillamore House, within what was once the estate's deer park, a managed landscape feature common to large Irish demesnes from the medieval period onward. The southern side of the enclosing element is not clearly visible in orthophotography taken between 2005 and 2012, which leaves the full outline incomplete. Compilers have noted it could represent the remains of a small field, though its date remains uncertain. The record was compiled by Fiona Rooney and uploaded in March 2021.

For anyone wishing to examine the site, the most accessible approach is through aerial or satellite imagery; the outline is visible on Google Earth orthoimages, which offer the clearest sense of its shape and extent. On the ground, the enclosure lies within private demesne land, so any visit would require appropriate permissions. The deer park setting means the surrounding landscape has changed considerably over time, and there is little to distinguish the site visually at ground level. Looking at the 1986 aerial photograph alongside the Google Earth imagery gives the best understanding of what survives, and draws attention to just how much can remain unrecorded until a camera happens to pass overhead at the right angle.

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