Enclosure, Kilduff, Co. Limerick

Co. Limerick |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Kilduff, Co. Limerick

What looks, at first glance, like a slight thickening of the pasture on a south-east-facing slope in County Limerick is, on closer inspection, the faint but legible outline of a circular earthwork that has been quietly sinking back into the land for a very long time.

The enclosure at Kilduff sits roughly 90 metres north-west of the townland boundary with Garrison, its defining bank now so thoroughly levelled that the interior stands only about a quarter of a metre above the surrounding ground on its inner face, while the outer edge rises just over a metre. Two cattle breaches, each several metres wide, have opened up at the north and north-east, the animals having done over decades what centuries of weathering began.

The story of how this monument has been perceived is almost as interesting as the monument itself. When the Ordnance Survey mapped the area at six inches to the mile in 1840, the enclosure was recorded not as an antiquity but as a tree-planted enclosure, a functional landscape feature rather than a relic of the past. By the time the revised twenty-five-inch OS map appeared in 1897, the picture had shifted: the feature was shown as a subcircular earthwork, and a short distance to its south-west, just four metres away, the map noted something called Keating's Well. That name anchors the site in a specifically local tradition, the well almost certainly a holy well, a category of site in Ireland typically associated with a patron saint or a family name and visited for devotional or curative purposes. The Archaeological Survey of Ireland visited in 2008, surveying and drawing up a sketch plan and cross-section. Their measurements put the enclosure at 21 metres east to west and 20 metres north to south, with a bank width of 7.65 metres where it survives. A broad drain runs outside the monument from the south-south-west, visible on the 1897 map and still present on the ground; a local authority water supply station occupies a subrectangular plot just to its west.

The earthwork is visible on aerial and satellite imagery, including an OSi orthoimage from the 2005 to 2012 period and a Google Earth image captured in June 2018, which gives a useful orientation before any visit to improved pasture that offers few obvious landmarks. The interior has a gentle eastward slope, and undulations further east and south-east appear to result from natural water action rather than human activity. Keating's Well, if it survives at all, would be worth seeking out a few metres to the south-west of the bank's edge, though its present condition is not recorded in the survey notes compiled by Alison McQueen and Vera Rahilly and uploaded in September 2020.

Rated 0 out of 5

Visitor Notes

Review type for post source and places source type not found
Added by
Picture of Pete F
Pete F
IrishHistory.com is passionate about helping people discover and connect with the rich stories of their local communities.
Please use the form below to submit any photos you may have of Enclosure, Kilduff, Co. Limerick. We're happy to take any suggested edits you may have too. Please be advised it will take us some time to get to these submissions. Thank you.
Name
Email
Message
Upload images/documents
Maximum file size: 100 MB
If you'd like to add an image or a PDF please do it here.

Advertisement