Enclosure, Laghtane East, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Enclosures
A circular enclosure sitting in flat, undulating pasture near the Limerick townland of Laghtane East is easy to miss, and not only because much of it has quietly disappeared.
The site is the kind of place that exists more completely in old maps and aerial photographs than it does in the field, where only half of the original ring survives as a visible feature above ground.
The enclosure, roughly circular with a diameter of approximately 25 metres, was recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1840, which places it firmly within the nineteenth-century cartographic record at a minimum. Circular enclosures of this type are broadly associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, where a ringfort, the most common form of such a monument, would have enclosed a farmstead or small settlement within a raised earthen bank. Whether this particular example is of that tradition is not specified in the available record, but the form is consistent with it. By the time the OS resurveyed the area for the 25-inch map of 1897, the enclosure's outline was still legible enough to illustrate. More recent orthophotographs, taken between 2011 and 2013 by Digital Globe and again in June 2018 via Google Earth, show the north-western half of the arc still incorporated into modern field boundaries, while the south-eastern half has been removed as a surface feature and is thought to survive only below ground. The record was compiled by Edmond O'Donovan and uploaded in July 2020.
The monument sits approximately 70 metres east of the townland boundary with Biddyford. Access to the visible portion is complicated by the fact that it now lies under dense scrub woodland where two field boundaries converge, which means that even the surviving arc is not straightforward to examine on the ground. A visitor coming specifically to see it should expect the enclosure to read more clearly on a satellite image than in person, and should be prepared for overgrown conditions regardless of season. The earthwork itself is subtle; what remains is essentially a curved boundary absorbed into the landscape rather than a legible ring standing apart from it.