Enclosure, Mulderricksfield, Co. Limerick

Co. Limerick |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Mulderricksfield, Co. Limerick

There is a particular kind of absence that sits in the Irish landscape with more weight than most presences.

In a field called Mulderricksfield, in County Limerick, that absence has a diameter: roughly seventy metres, the size of a substantial circular enclosure that once rose from a low, gentle hill amid rolling pasture. It is gone now, levelled completely, leaving nothing at ground level to suggest it was ever there.

The enclosure appears on the 1841 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, that extraordinarily detailed early survey which captured Ireland's monuments at a moment when many were still visible, and which has since become an indispensable record of what the countryside once held. Circular enclosures of this kind, sometimes called ringforts or raths, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically consisting of an earthen bank and ditch enclosing a domestic space. A diameter of seventy metres would place this one at a reasonably generous scale. When surveyor Denis Power inspected the site, compiled in August 2011, no trace of the monument was evident. The low rise on which it stood is still there; the enclosure itself is not.

The field is in undulating pasture, which means the approach involves reading the land rather than following a path. There is nothing to see in the conventional sense, and that is arguably the point. The value here is cartographic and conceptual as much as physical; the 1841 OS map can be consulted through the Historical 25-inch and 6-inch mapping layers available on geohive.ie or osi.ie, where the monument's outline can be overlaid against the current landscape. For anyone interested in monument loss or agricultural change in the Irish countryside, Mulderricksfield is a quietly instructive example of how completely a feature of that scale can disappear, absorbed into farmland with no surface trace remaining.

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