Enclosure, Kilcurly (Kenry By.), Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Enclosures
In a field in County Limerick, a circle is visible from the sky that you would almost certainly walk past without noticing on the ground.
Roughly twenty metres across, the outline of a circular enclosure sits in open grassland in the townland of Kilcurly, in the old barony of Kenry. It leaves no standing walls, no obvious earthwork, no marker of any kind for the casual passer-by. Its presence was confirmed through aerial photography, the kind of ghostly crop or soil mark that only makes sense when viewed from above.
The enclosure was identified in Google Earth photographs dated 16 March 2016, and remains clearly visible in Digital Globe aerial imagery. It sits approximately sixty metres north-north-west of a recorded ringfort, the site catalogued as LI012-130. Ringforts, for context, are the remains of enclosed farmsteads, typically of early medieval date, once common across the Irish countryside and now numbering in the tens of thousands. Enclosures of the kind recorded at Kilcurly are harder to classify. They may be associated with settlement, with agriculture, or with activity entirely unrelated to the nearby ringfort. The record was compiled by Caimin O'Brien, drawing on details provided by Dr. Rob O'Hara, and uploaded to the national monuments database in February 2020. Beyond that, the site has no excavation record and no confirmed date.
There is no visitor infrastructure here, and the enclosure is on private agricultural land, so access would require the landowner's permission. The outline is not something you could trace on foot with any confidence; its shape only resolves properly when viewed through aerial imagery, which is freely available via Google Earth or the Historic Environment Viewer maintained by the National Monuments Service. For anyone interested in landscape archaeology, comparing the aerial view with the surrounding topography, and noting the spatial relationship between the enclosure and the nearby ringfort just to its south-south-east, is where the real interest lies. What exactly connected these two features, if anything did, remains an open question.
