Enclosure, Liffane, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Enclosures
A field boundary has quietly erased half of this ancient enclosure near Liffane in County Limerick, leaving only a D-shaped ghost of what was once a complete circular monument.
The enclosure survives as something cut in two, its eastern half entirely lost beneath or beyond the north-south field boundary that bisects the site. What remains on the western side has the odd quality of a thing that doesn't quite know what shape it used to be.
When the Ordnance Survey recorded this area for its six-inch map in 1841, the monument was visible as a roughly circular embanked enclosure, approximately twenty metres in diameter. Circular earthwork enclosures of this type, often called ring forts or raths, were typically used as enclosed farmsteads during the early medieval period in Ireland, the surrounding bank offering both a boundary marker and a degree of protection for a household and its animals. At Liffane, that circular form has since been severed. The eastern portion has been levelled entirely, leaving a D-shaped area measuring about 16.5 metres north to south and 8.4 metres east to west. The surviving bank, composed of earth and stone, rises to just under a metre in height on its interior face, though it stands only about 35 centimetres above the ground on the outside. A dry-stone field wall, roughly two metres wide, runs along what is now the eastern edge of the surviving portion, replacing or obscuring whatever bank once continued there. The site was recorded and compiled by Denis Power and uploaded to the national monuments record in August 2011.
The enclosure sits on a north-east facing hill slope and is currently in pasture. The interior, which is noticeably lower than the surrounding ground by around 60 centimetres, is overgrown with briars and not immediately legible as anything ancient from a distance. Access is through a gate in the field boundary at the north-east corner of the surviving section. That slight depression in the interior is worth paying attention to; it is one of the clearest physical signs that the ground here was shaped deliberately and long ago, even if the boundary wall that cuts across it has made the full original form difficult to read.