Enclosure (Large), Cottage, Co. Limerick

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Enclosures

Enclosure (Large), Cottage, Co. Limerick

What lies beneath a quietly ordinary field in the townland of Cottage, County Limerick, is visible only from above, and even then only in the right season, under the right light.

A circular cropmark roughly 35 metres across, showing faintly in aerial imagery from September 2018, is all that remains of what was once a substantial prehistoric or early medieval enclosure measuring, at its greatest extent, around 140 metres in diameter. The earthwork has not simply fallen into ruin; it has been systematically, if gradually, erased, swallowed by drainage works, fencing, and the ordinary business of farming across at least two centuries.

When the Ordnance Survey first mapped this part of Limerick at six inches to the mile in 1840, the enclosure was still legible on the ground: a circular bank with a wide berm, forming what surveyors classify as a concentric-type enclosure, meaning it had more than one ring of earthworks. The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp described it between 1916 and 1918 as a fort ranging from around 91 to 107 metres in diameter, still showing two rings at that point. By the time the OSi resurveyed at 25 inches to the mile in 1897, the outer enclosing berm had already gone, levelled sometime in the intervening decades. A later account by a scholar identified only as O'Kelly described a Type B Earthwork, a category referring to a circular raised platform ringed by a wide fosse, or ditch, and an outer bank. O'Kelly recorded a platform height of around 2.4 metres above the fosse bottom, and noted damage from a drainage trench cut through the structure and from fences erected across it. By the time aerial photography was carried out between 2005 and 2012, no surface trace remained visible at all.

The site sits in pasture, roughly 120 metres west of the townland boundary with Baunnageeragh, 250 metres north of Ballygrennan, and 300 metres north of Ballycullane, which gives a reasonably precise fix on the map but does not make the place easy to locate on the ground. There is, in the conventional sense, nothing to see when standing in the field. The cropmark that appeared in the 2018 Google Earth imagery is the kind of feature visible only from altitude, when differential soil moisture or crop growth betrays a buried fosse beneath the surface. Late summer, when cereal crops or pasture grasses respond to buried disturbances by ripening unevenly, is the period most likely to reveal such traces. For anyone with an interest in landscape archaeology rather than upstanding monuments, this is a site that rewards study of aerial and satellite images far more than a visit in person.

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