Enclosure, Killorath, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Enclosures
A circular enclosure roughly fifty metres across sits in flat pasture in Killorath, County Limerick, and for most of its existence it was known to no cartographer.
The historic Ordnance Survey Ireland maps, which recorded the landscape of this part of Limerick in considerable detail, contain no trace of it. It survived in the ground and in the grass, quietly shaping the field boundaries around it, without ever earning a mark on paper.
The site came to official attention in 1986, when an aerial photographic survey operating out of Bruff picked it up from the air, logged under the reference Bruff 67, AP 4/3598. Aerial survey has long been one of the primary tools for identifying enclosures of this kind in Ireland, since the slight differences in soil moisture and crop growth that betray a buried or degraded earthwork are often only legible from above. An enclosure, in the archaeological sense, is a roughly circular or oval area defined by a bank, ditch, or wall, and they are among the most common monument types in the Irish countryside, associated variously with early medieval settlement, stock management, or ritual use. In subsequent decades, satellite imagery confirmed what the 1986 survey had suggested. Orthoimages taken between 2005 and 2012 by Ordnance Survey Ireland, and by Digital Globe between 2011 and 2013, show the western quarter of the circle folded into a modern field boundary, the remaining arc still legible on the ground. Google Earth imagery from 2006, 2016, and 2018 records the same feature, measuring approximately fifty metres north to south and fifty-two metres east to west, pressed up against a field boundary on its western side. A second enclosure, separately recorded, lies about 145 metres to the west.
The site sits on level ground about 75 metres north of the townland boundary with Meanus and 840 metres east of the Camoge River. There is no public monument or signage, and the enclosure is not the kind of place that announces itself on arrival; what remains is subtle, most of it absorbed into the working field pattern. Those with access to the relevant aerial and satellite imagery, linked through the Historic Environment Viewer maintained by the National Monuments Service, will find the arc of the enclosure easier to read from above than from the ground. The record was compiled by Edmond O'Donovan and uploaded in October 2020.