Enclosure, Deegerty, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Enclosures
A field in Deegerty, County Limerick, contains a circular depression that is easy to walk past without fully registering what you are looking at.
The ground dips noticeably toward the centre, the lowest point sitting within a roughly oval footprint measuring 32 metres north to south and 30 metres east to west. It is only when you begin to read the edges that the structure becomes apparent, and the sense of something deliberate, something engineered long ago, starts to take shape beneath the pasture grass.
The enclosure sits on a south-facing slope and is defined by two distinct types of boundary working in combination. Along the northeast to south-southeast and the southwest to northwest arcs, an earthen bank forms the perimeter, rising about 0.6 metres on the interior face and only 0.15 metres on the exterior, which suggests the bank was built up from material scraped out of the interior rather than piled in from outside. Along the remaining sections, from south-southeast to southwest and from northwest to northeast, the boundary takes the form of a scarped edge, essentially a cut or shaped slope in the ground itself, facing inward and dropping around 0.9 metres. Enclosures of this kind, broad circular earthworks defined by banks and ditches or scarped edges, are found across Ireland and are associated variously with early medieval settlement, livestock management, or ceremonial use, though without excavation it is rarely possible to say which function any individual example served. The record was compiled by Denis Power and uploaded in August 2011.
The site lies under ordinary pasture and there are no visitor facilities or marked access points. The interior depression is most legible in low, raking light, particularly in the early morning or late afternoon when shadows settle into the slight hollow at the centre and trace the line of the bank more clearly than they would at midday. If the grass is long, the earthworks can be difficult to distinguish from ordinary undulation in the field, so late winter or early spring, when growth is low, tends to offer the clearest view of the ground surface.