Enclosure, Toberagarriff, Co. Limerick

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Toberagarriff, Co. Limerick

An earthwork enclosure that has been slowly disappearing into the landscape around it makes for an unusual kind of historical record, and the one in the townland of Toberagarriff, County Limerick, is a particularly instructive case.

What survives today is barely recognisable as a monument at all: a fragment of bank along the northern side, two access roads cutting across what was once a coherent boundary, and ground where trees once stood, now cleared. The gravel quarry immediately to the west has not helped matters.

The site was already being mapped in some form by the time the first Ordnance Survey six-inch sheets were produced in 1840, which show a sub-circular enclosure, a shape broadly consistent with the ringforts and enclosures that appear across the Irish countryside, though no antiquarian designation was ever formally attached to this particular example. An enclosure of this kind typically consists of a raised earthen bank defining a roughly circular or oval area, sometimes associated with early medieval settlement or agricultural use. By the time the twenty-five inch OS revision was published in 1897, the feature was being represented simply as an irregular field boundary, measuring approximately 37 metres northwest to southeast and 28 metres northeast to southwest, with an opening at the northwest. It had, in other words, been absorbed into the ordinary fabric of the farmed landscape without any note of its possible age or significance. Field boundaries were shown radiating outward from the northern, eastern, southern, and later northwestern sides, suggesting the enclosure had been quietly pressed into service as a convenient corner of the field system.

By the time Google Earth orthoimagery was captured in June 2018, the picture was considerably bleaker. The enclosing bank survived only along the northern arc; everywhere else it had been levelled. The interior, which satellite imagery from 2011 to 2013 had shown still partly defined, had been cleared of trees, and new roadways had been pushed across both the northern and southern edges of the monument to service the quarry to the west. The townland boundary with Farnane lies around 140 metres to the west, which offers a rough fix on the site's location for anyone approaching with a map. Access to the surrounding area is complicated by the active quarrying operation, and there is little on the ground today that announces itself as anything other than a working agricultural and industrial landscape.

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