Enclosure, Rower More, Co. Limerick

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Rower More, Co. Limerick

A low limestone outcrop in a working Limerick farmyard might seem an unlikely place to go looking for the past, but at Rower More something older than the farm itself persists quietly beneath the hay barn and silage pit.

Set roughly 120 metres south and west of the Greanagh River, a roughly polygonal enclosure has been absorbing new farm buildings for decades, its original outline now only partially readable in stone, hedgerow, and trees. It has never been marked as an antiquity on any Ordnance Survey map, which is itself a small puzzle. Whatever its origins, it has slipped through the official record almost entirely unnoticed.

The earliest clear cartographic evidence comes from the 1840 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, which shows a six-sided field on this spot, with later maps continuing to record the same shape. By the time the 25-inch map was produced in 1897, the enclosure, measuring approximately 30 metres north to south and 35 metres east to west, was shown alongside a farmhouse immediately to its north, apparently functioning as a small paddock or garden. When the Archaeological Survey of Ireland inspected the site in 1996, they found a raised, semi-circular area enclosed by a drystone wall, a construction technique in which stones are laid without mortar, relying on careful placement for structural integrity. The recorded dimensions at that point were 21.4 metres north to south and 33.2 metres east to west. The northern half had already been largely lost to the building of a hay barn and silage pit, and what survived best was a section at the south-west, where a wall some 3.6 metres wide, with an earthen core, still stood to an internal height of between 0.85 and 0.9 metres, and an external height of 1.35 metres.

The site is within an active farmyard, so any visit would require the goodwill of the landowner and an awareness that this is a working landscape rather than an open monument. The most legible remnant is that south-western stretch of drystone walling; the rest of the enclosure boundary survives only as a line of hedgerow and trees, which shows up more clearly on aerial imagery than on the ground. A Google Earth orthophoto taken in June 2018 captures the outline well. The enclosure is now used as a paddock, pressed up against the south side of the farm buildings, and its age and original purpose remain unresolved questions.

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