Enclosure, Dromlara, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Enclosures
In a quiet field in County Limerick, an ancient enclosure exists that has never appeared on any Ordnance Survey historic map, and which no one walking the land would easily recognise as anything at all.
There is no visible bank, no ditch, no upstanding stonework. The monument announces itself only from the air, and only under the right conditions, as a faint oval shadow pressed into the grass.
The enclosure at Dromlara was first identified during the Bruff aerial photographic survey of 1986, recorded as reference Bruff 134, AP 4/3723. What the survey captured was a cropmark, the term used when buried archaeological features cause differential growth in overlying vegetation, making buried walls or ditches faintly readable from altitude. The shape that emerged was oval, measuring approximately 31 metres west-northwest to east-southeast and 29 metres north-northeast to south-southwest, placing it in the general scale of early Irish enclosed settlements, though its precise date and function remain unconfirmed. It sits in gently undulating pasture roughly 200 metres to the south-east of a property called Sun Ville, and just 23 metres east-south-east of the townland boundary with Sunville. The monument was compiled in the record by Alison McQueen and Vera Rahilly, uploaded in July 2020. Later aerial imagery confirmed the cropmark was still legible on Digital Globe orthophotos taken between 2011 and 2013, and again on Google Earth imagery captured on 28 June 2018.
For anyone curious enough to seek it out, the site sits on private agricultural land, so access would require permission from the landowner. There is nothing to see at ground level; the enclosure is meaningful only when viewed through aerial photography or by consulting the survey images associated with the record. The best practical approach for an interested visitor is to examine the available Google Earth orthoimage and the Bruff aerial survey photograph, which together show how clearly the oval form reads from above despite leaving no trace whatsoever on the surface. The site is a reminder of how much of the Irish landscape is legible only at a remove, its archaeology invisible to those standing on it, waiting for the right angle and the right season of growth to give itself away.