Enclosure, Inchacoomb, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Enclosures
On the western slopes approaching the Galtee Mountains in County Limerick, a low circular rise in the upland pasture at Inchacoomb is easy to mistake for a natural feature of the landscape.
It is not. The roughly circular area, approximately thirty metres in diameter, is defined by a scarp running from the south-west around to the north and south-east, and what you are looking at is the remains of an enclosure, the kind of enclosed settlement that was once a common fixture of early Irish life across this type of elevated terrain.
The site appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1840, marked simply as a circular enclosure, and by the time the more detailed twenty-five-inch map was published in 1897, its raised form and curving boundary were recorded more precisely. The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp, who documented a remarkable number of Irish earthworks in the early twentieth century, noted it in 1919 as a conjoined fort, meaning it was associated with an adjacent enclosure immediately to the north. Enclosures of this type, often called ring forts or raths depending on their construction, were typically used as farmsteads during the early medieval period, with the enclosing bank or scarp providing a boundary for domestic activity and livestock rather than any serious military defence. The southern edge of this example has been cut across by a field boundary running north-west to south-east, a common fate for sites that remained in agricultural use long after their original function was forgotten.
The site sits roughly 150 metres east of a watercourse that marks the townland boundary with Baurnagurrahy. On the ground, it is largely obscured by scrub growth, which is visible in satellite imagery and likely makes the underlying earthwork difficult to read without knowing what to look for. The companion enclosure to the north, recorded separately, gives the site its particular character as a pair, and anyone with an interest in the distribution of early settlement patterns along the Galtee foothills will find the relationship between the two features worth examining on the older Ordnance Survey maps before attempting a visit.