Enclosure, Gormanstown (Phillips), Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Enclosures
Some archaeological sites announce themselves with standing stones or grassy mounds.
This one, in a field of reclaimed pasture near the townland boundary of Gormanstown in County Limerick, announces itself with almost nothing at all. No earthwork, no hollow, no scatter of stone. What brought it to anyone's attention was a faint circular variation in the colour of growing crops, the kind of thing invisible at ground level but legible, briefly and under the right conditions, from the air.
The site was identified during examination of aerial photographs taken on 3 November 1984 as part of the Bórd Gáis Éireann gas pipeline survey, using imagery at a scale of 1:10,000. A cropmark, to explain the term, forms when buried features such as ditches or walls affect how plants above them grow; a filled-in ditch retains more moisture and produces lusher, darker growth, while a buried wall does the opposite. In this case, a small circular differential growth of vegetation caught the attention of whoever was working through the photographs. The site sits 74 metres southeast of the townland boundary with Gormanstown, and it does not appear on any Ordnance Survey Ireland historic mapping. By the time orthophotographs were taken between 2005 and 2012, no surface evidence remained. Google Earth imagery tells the same story. The record, compiled by Fiona Rooney and uploaded in June 2021, notes the site as being of doubtful antiquity.
There is, in practical terms, very little for a visitor to find. The reclaimed pasture shows nothing. The circular mark that prompted the original record has not reappeared in any subsequent imagery, and without knowing the precise agricultural conditions of that November day in 1984, it may never be possible to say with confidence what, if anything, lies beneath the soil. The interest here is not in what can be seen but in what the process of looking has produced: a site that exists primarily as a notation, a question mark on the landscape held open by a single set of aerial photographs and the careful attention of someone who thought the crop growth looked slightly, possibly, worth recording.