Enclosure, Lisduane, Co. Limerick

Co. Limerick |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Lisduane, Co. Limerick

On a north-facing slope in County Limerick, the rough pasture holds what may once have been a substantial enclosed space, now so reduced by time and agriculture that its outline is legible only from the air.

What survives is a sub-circular form defined by an overgrown fosse, a ditch dug to mark or defend a boundary, and a scatter of trees following the old perimeter, with a gap opening at the south-west. It is the kind of site that rewards patience with maps more than boots on the ground.

The enclosure at Lisduane has been flickering in and out of the documentary record for nearly two centuries. The first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1840 recorded possible traces of it still standing within the southern quadrant of an L-shaped woodland plantation, suggesting the trees had grown up around surviving earthworks. By the 1897 edition of the twenty-five-inch map, what remained was partially depicted as an L-shaped scarp, a low linear slope in the ground, in the southern quadrant of a field, the plantation apparently gone and the monument already much reduced. An Archaeological Survey of Ireland aerial photograph taken on 18 September 2005 showed what may be a levelled monument, and orthophotographs taken between 2005 and 2012, along with a Google Earth image dated 28 June 2018, confirmed the sub-circular outline still readable through overgrowth. The site sits 310 metres south-west of the townland boundary with Grannagh and 400 metres south-east of Lisduane House, placing it in a landscape that also contains a ringfort approximately 317 metres to the north-east. Ringforts, roughly circular enclosures built largely between the sixth and tenth centuries, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, and their proximity to other enclosures is not unusual; the two monument types frequently occur in the same territories.

The site is in rough pasture on private farmland, and there is no formal public access. For those with a serious interest, the most useful approach is through the digitised Ordnance Survey maps held by the OSi and through the National Monuments Service record, where the aerial photography compiled by Fiona Rooney and uploaded in April 2021 gives the clearest sense of what the enclosure looks like from above. On the ground, the fosse and the line of trees following the old circuit are what to look for, along with the slight change in gradient where the scarp persists. Late winter or early spring, before vegetation thickens, offers the best chance of reading the earthwork in person.

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