Enclosure, Lissaleen, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Enclosures
In a field in County Limerick, somewhere between the townlands of Lissaleen and Lurraga, there is a site that has essentially ceased to exist, and yet keeps leaving traces.
No bank survives above ground, no ditch, no visible outline. Walk across this pasture today and you would notice nothing at all. But look down from satellite altitude at the right moment, and something stirs beneath the surface.
The enclosure appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1840, recorded as a roughly circular area defined by a bank. Circular enclosures of this kind are common across Ireland and are often associated with early medieval settlement; a ringfort, or rath, typically consisted of an earthen bank surrounding a domestic space, sometimes reinforced with a ditch and used to protect a farmstead and its livestock. Whatever this example once was, it had already begun to disappear from the official record by the end of the nineteenth century. When the Ordnance Survey revised its mapping at the twenty-five-inch scale in 1897, the enclosure was gone from the sheet entirely, suggesting that by then little enough remained to warrant marking. The site sits approximately 160 metres west of the townland boundary with Lurraga, a location noted by researcher Martin Fitzpatrick, who compiled the record in June 2020.
A Google Earth orthoimage captured in February 2018 shows a possible faint cropmark at the site, that subtle variation in vegetation colour and growth that can reveal buried features when soil moisture and crop stress interact with what lies underground. A later image from 2020 shows nothing. Cropmarks are seasonal and contingent, appearing and vanishing with rainfall, crop type, and the angle of light, so any trace here is likely to be fleeting. There is nothing to see in the conventional sense, and no infrastructure of access; this is ordinary farmland in private ownership. The interest lies less in visiting than in the way the site illustrates how much of Ireland's early landscape has moved from mapped record to buried memory to near-invisibility within the span of a century and a half, occasionally surfacing, just barely, in the right conditions.