Enclosure, Lisbane, Co. Limerick

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Lisbane, Co. Limerick

A small enclosure sitting on a gentle west-facing slope in County Limerick turns out to be rather harder to read than it first appears.

It measures only about eleven metres across its north-south axis, yet it has been enclosed by two quite different means: an earthen bank running from the east-south-east around to the west-south-west, and a dry-stone wall completing the circuit in the opposite direction. That combination, earthwork on one side and mortarless stonework on the other, is not the kind of thing that results from a single, tidy act of construction, and it raises more questions than the landscape is currently willing to answer.

The dry-stone wall survives to an internal height of around half a metre and an external height of just over a metre, which suggests it has been maintained or at least partially intact for a considerable period. On the outside of the enclosure, running from the west-south-west around to the north-north-east, there is a fosse, a shallow external ditch, roughly three metres wide and only about twenty centimetres deep at present. Shallow as it is, a fosse of this kind is a characteristic feature of early enclosures in Ireland, where such boundaries could serve agricultural, territorial, or ceremonial purposes. The wall itself has been absorbed into a north-south field boundary, meaning the enclosure's fabric has been quietly repurposed by whoever was farming the land in later centuries. The earthen bank, running the other half of the circuit, is now heavily masked by overgrowth, with organic debris piled against its outer face. The site was recorded and compiled by Denis Power, with notes uploaded in August 2011.

The interior dips gently towards its centre beneath dense vegetation, which makes close inspection difficult without some effort. The enclosure sits in pasture on a slight break in the slope, which gives it a faint sense of deliberate placement, as though the ground itself was chosen for a reason. The stonework and the fosse are probably the clearest features to make out from the field boundary side, while the earthen bank requires closer attention and a willingness to peer through the overgrowth. There is no formal access or signage, and as with many unscheduled earthworks in agricultural land, approaching the landowner beforehand would be the sensible course.

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Pete F
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