Enclosure, Garrane More, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Enclosures
In a field of reclaimed pasture in south County Limerick, there is an ancient enclosure that you cannot see.
No earthwork rises from the grass, no stone marks the perimeter, and the ordnance survey maps, historic and modern alike, record nothing here. The only evidence that something once stood in this spot came from the air, and only briefly, captured in a single photographic survey before vanishing again from every subsequent image taken of the ground.
The site sits on the flood plain of two rivers, the Dead River and the Mulkear, within the townland of Garrane More, close to its boundary with Dromeenboy. It was identified in 1986 during the Bruff aerial photographic survey, when the outline of a pennanular enclosure became legible as a cropmark from above. A pennanular shape is essentially a near-complete ring, open at one point, a form commonly associated with early medieval enclosures in Ireland, though the precise date and function of this particular example remain unknown. Cropmarks of this kind appear when buried ditches or banks, long since levelled, cause subtle differences in the growth or colour of crops or grass above them, differences that become readable only under certain light and seasonal conditions. When researchers checked the site against later orthophotographic imagery, including surveys taken between 2005 and 2013 and a Google Earth image from March 2017, the cropmark had disappeared entirely. Two nearby monuments, a ditch barrow and a second enclosure, lie roughly 130 and 135 metres away to the north-west and east respectively, suggesting this stretch of flood plain once held considerably more than the current landscape implies.
There is nothing to visit in the conventional sense. The enclosure is not signposted, not preserved, and not visible on the ground. Accessing flood-plain pasture of this kind typically means navigating private farmland, and any visit would require landowner permission. The interest here is less about standing in a particular spot and more about what the record itself reveals, that a single overflight on the right day in 1986 preserved the only trace of something that the land has otherwise absorbed completely. The compiled record, prepared by Alison McQueen and Vera Rahilly and uploaded in October 2020, exists now as the sole document of the monument's shape.