Enclosure, Oldtown (Bennett), Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Enclosures
Some ancient sites announce themselves with standing stones or grassy mounds.
This one, tucked into improved pasture in the Oldtown townland of County Limerick, is visible only to those looking down from above, or to those who know what a dry summer can reveal in a field of grass. The enclosure here leaves almost no mark on the ground as you walk it. Its outline survives mainly as a cropmark, that quiet phenomenon where buried ditches or banks alter how crops draw moisture from the soil, producing faint but legible patterns in aerial photographs that would be entirely invisible at eye level.
The site was first identified during the Bruff aerial photographic survey of 1986, catalogued as Bruff 134, and has never appeared on historic Ordnance Survey Ireland maps, which suggests it had already lost whatever surface expression it once had before systematic cartographic recording began. What those early aerial images revealed was enough to classify it as an enclosure, a broad category covering a range of enclosed spaces defined by a surrounding ditch, or fosse, which may have served any number of purposes from settlement to ritual to agricultural use. A later aerial photograph taken on 10 May 2003 confirmed the monument as an oval-shaped area defined by a fosse. More recently, faint cropmark traces have been picked out on OSi orthophotos taken between 2005 and 2012, and again on a Google Earth image dated 20 September 2020. The record was compiled by Martin Fitzpatrick and uploaded in April 2021.
The enclosure sits approximately 220 metres west of a local watercourse and immediately south of a local road, within what is now managed grazing land. There is nothing on the surface to indicate its presence, and access would require the landowner's permission. The best chance of seeing any trace of it is through aerial imagery rather than a site visit, and even then the cropmarks are described as faint. Searching the relevant Google Earth imagery from September 2020 or consulting the ASIAP aerial photograph reference (369)1 offers the clearest available view of an outline that has spent decades almost entirely erasing itself from the landscape.