Enclosure, Nicker, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Enclosures
For well over a century and a half, this low earthwork in the Limerick townland of Nicker was treated as nothing more remarkable than a field boundary.
The Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1840 recorded it as a plain rectangular field, unremarkable enough to carry no antiquarian notation whatsoever. By the time the twenty-five-inch edition appeared in 1897, the outline had shifted slightly in the cartographers' rendering to sub-rectangular, but still no one thought to flag it as something older than the surrounding farmland. The monument had, in effect, been hiding in plain sight, folded quietly into the working landscape of improved pasture on a gentle west-facing slope, about fifty metres from the townland boundary with Garrane More.
It was O'Dwyer who first put the feature on record as an antiquity, describing it in 1959 as a slightly raised area surrounded by a low bank, which is a fair if understated summary. When the Archaeological Survey of Ireland carried out a measured survey in 2008, a more precise picture emerged. The monument resolved into a roughly D-shaped raised area, approximately 36 metres north to south and 34 metres east to west, defined by a levelled scarp, a fosse (a shallow external ditch), and an outer bank running from the east-northeast around through the south to the southwest. A possible causewayed entrance, where the bank steps back to allow passage, was identified at the east-northeast. Along the western side, the enclosing bank has been absorbed wholesale into the modern field boundary, and a 7-metre breach at the northern end of that same side now serves as a farm gateway. Aerial photography has proved particularly revealing: cropmarks showing the full subrectangular outline, measuring roughly 47 metres by 45 metres, are visible on multiple orthoimage surveys taken between 2005 and 2018, the contrast between the buried archaeology and the growing crops above it doing the interpretive work that centuries of maps had quietly declined to do.
The site sits in working agricultural land, so access is a matter of courtesy rather than right; the surrounding pasture is privately owned. The earthworks themselves are low and easily missed at ground level, the scarp rising only about 25 centimetres and the outer bank reaching 85 centimetres on its exterior face at best. Walking the perimeter, the shallow fosse and the absorbed western bank are the most legible features. The cropmark evidence suggests the full extent of the monument extends somewhat beyond what is visible as earthwork today, so it is worth pausing to read the field as a whole rather than focusing solely on the raised interior.