Enclosure (Large), Kilduff, Co. Limerick

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Enclosures

Enclosure (Large), Kilduff, Co. Limerick

Somewhere in the wet, level pasture of Kilduff in County Limerick, a large oval earthwork sits at the centre of a field, ringed by up to six possible burial mounds.

What makes the place quietly arresting is the combination: a ringfort, which is an enclosed farmstead of early medieval Ireland typically defined by a circular bank and ditch, surrounded by what may be a cluster of ancient barrows, the low mounded graves of an earlier era still. The two things coexist in the same field without obvious explanation, and that unexplained proximity is precisely what makes the site worth attention.

Locally the site is known as Rathfaun, a name recorded by O'Dwyer in 1959, when he measured an internal diameter of around 61 metres and noted that the interior is slightly raised above the surrounding field. In the north-east quadrant he identified what appeared to be the remains of a circular house roughly 6.4 metres across, its outline barely a hand's width above the level of the enclosure interior. The enclosing bank had by then been worn down to around 0.9 metres in height, and the wide external ditch, some 5.5 metres across, seemed to have a trench running from it towards a nearby stream, suggesting it may once have been water-filled. When the Archaeological Survey of Ireland resurveyed the monument in 2008 they recorded an oval area measuring 54 metres north-west to south-east and 44 metres north-east to south-west, with multiple breaches in the inner bank and a ring-barrow set slightly off-centre to the east. The outer bank and fosse remain best defined on the northern and eastern sides. The site had already appeared on the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1840, shown as a circular enclosure, and was revised to a suboval shape on the 25-inch edition of 1897.

The monument lies 45 metres north-west of the townland boundary with Ballyhurst, and the hill of Knockseefin is visible to the west-north-west from the field. Aerial photography from 1986, 2000, and subsequent satellite imagery confirms the earthwork reads clearly from above, though at ground level the low, denuded banks require a slow walk around the perimeter to appreciate the full scale. The interior uneven ground, the off-centre barrow, and the trace of the old drain extending from the fosse to the north are all details that reward careful looking rather than a quick glance from the field gate.

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