Enclosure, Glenbrohane, Co. Limerick

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Glenbrohane, Co. Limerick

On a broad upland pasture in County Limerick, a roughly circular earthwork sits quietly in the landscape, known to almost no one and absent from the Ordnance Survey's historic mapping entirely.

It was not recorded on any official cartographic record, and it took satellite imagery, specifically Digital Globe orthoimages captured between 2011 and 2013 and a Google Earth image dated November 2018, to confirm what was actually there: a circular enclosure approximately 22 metres in diameter, defined by a bank and the faint traces of an external fosse. A fosse is simply a ditch dug around an earthwork, often to reinforce the boundary or make it harder to breach, and the survival of even partial traces here suggests the feature retains some integrity beneath the grass.

The site sits 320 metres south-east of the summit of a hill rising to 800 feet, or around 243 metres, in the Glenbrohane area. It does not stand alone in the landscape. Doonglara Hillfort lies just 115 metres to the north-west, and a second enclosure sits 80 metres to the south-east. Hillforts are typically large prehistoric enclosures defined by one or more banks and ditches, often occupying prominent high ground, and the clustering of smaller enclosures around such a feature is not unusual in Irish upland archaeology. Whether this particular enclosure is contemporary with the hillfort, subordinate to it, or entirely unrelated in date is not yet established. The site was compiled by Martin Fitzpatrick and uploaded to the record in October 2021, which gives a sense of how recently some features are still being formally identified.

Access to this kind of upland site requires reasonable footwear and, ideally, familiarity with reading the terrain from online satellite tools before setting out, since there are no markers or signage. The enclosure is in open pasture, so land access considerations apply. The bank and fosse are subtle features, and they read more clearly from aerial perspective than from ground level, meaning a visitor walking across the site might struggle to distinguish the earthwork from natural undulation without knowing precisely where to look. Checking the Google Earth imagery beforehand, with the November 2018 image as a useful reference point, will help orient anyone making the effort to find it.

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Pete F
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