Enclosure, Garbally (Coshma By.), Co. Limerick

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Garbally (Coshma By.), Co. Limerick

A field in Garbally, in the barony of Coshma in County Limerick, holds the ghost of an enclosure that no historical map has ever acknowledged.

It does not appear on the Ordnance Survey's historic editions, and there is nothing on the ground to catch the eye of a passing walker. What gives it away is the grass itself, or rather the way crops and pasture betray buried features through subtle variations in growth and colour, producing what archaeologists call cropmarks. These faint signatures, read from the air rather than from the ground, are sometimes the only evidence that something once stood somewhere.

The site came to light in November 1984, when aerial photographs were taken during surveys for the Bórd Gáis Éireann Curraleigh West-Limerick gas pipeline. Examining those images, researchers identified a possible archaeological site, logged as Site No. 039133. Later orthophotography confirmed what the pipeline survey had suggested. An OSi orthophoto taken between 2005 and 2012, along with a Google Earth image dated September 2020, shows a partial cropmark outlining a D-shaped earthwork, approximately 36 metres north to south and 34 metres east to west. A post-1700 field boundary running north to south cuts across the eastern side, and further linear cropmarks intersect the earthwork at the north-west and south-west. A Google Earth image from April 2006 added another detail: a small circular enclosure, around 15 metres in diameter, visible within the centre of the larger cropmark. Circular enclosures of this kind are a familiar feature of early Irish settlement archaeology, often interpreted as the remains of ringforts or associated structures, though the record here makes no formal identification. Two other recorded monuments sit close by, an earthwork 37 metres to the north-west and a second enclosure 84 metres to the south-east, suggesting that this particular patch of Limerick pasture was once a good deal busier than it looks.

There is nothing to visit in any conventional sense. The site lies in private agricultural land, and its features are invisible at ground level. The clearest view remains the one that revealed it in the first place, from above, via the publicly accessible Google Earth archive. Searching the townland of Garbally in that tool and consulting images from around April 2006 offers the best chance of making out the small inner enclosure within the broader D-shaped mark. The record was compiled by Fiona Rooney and uploaded to the Archaeological Survey of Ireland database in April 2021, which is where the fullest account of the site currently lives.

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