Enclosure, Currahchase North, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Enclosures
There is something quietly disquieting about a monument that appears on a map but not on the ground.
At Currahchase North in County Limerick, an embanked enclosure was recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1923, marked out as an ovoid earthwork measuring roughly fifty metres north to south and thirty metres east to west, with a wide opening along its western side. By the time anyone came to inspect it properly, it had gone. Not obscured, not overgrown, but levelled entirely, leaving the cartographic record as the only real evidence that it ever stood.
Embanked enclosures of this general type are a recurring feature of the Irish landscape. They were formed by raising an earthen bank, sometimes accompanied by an external ditch, to define a roughly oval or circular space, and they appear in contexts ranging from early medieval settlement to livestock management. The opening on the western side noted in the 1923 survey would have been a characteristic entrance arrangement. The enclosure sat atop a hill in pasture ground, a position that would have given it some prominence in the surrounding landscape. When Denis Power compiled the site record, uploaded in August 2011, no trace of the monument was evident on inspection, suggesting it had been levelled at some point between its mapping in the early twentieth century and the date of survey.
Currahchase is probably better known today as a forest park managed by Coillte, the state forestry body, and the surrounding area draws visitors interested in its woodland walks and the ruins of the de Vere family house destroyed by fire in 1941. The enclosure site itself, being in private pasture on a hilltop and effectively invisible at ground level, offers nothing to see in the conventional sense. What it offers instead is a particular kind of historical vertigo: a place defined entirely by its absence, known only through a surveyor's line on a sheet of paper nearly a century old.
