Field system, Ballygrennan, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Ritual/Ceremonial
A medieval settlement that nobody knew was there, buried under ordinary Co. Limerick pasture, came to light not through a historian's hunch or a farmer's spade, but through aerial photographs taken in November 1984 during the laying of a Bórd Gáis Éireann gas pipeline.
The images revealed a series of small, adjoining, square-shaped fields, their outlines pressed faintly into the landscape. The site had never been marked on Ordnance Survey Ireland historic maps, and nothing on the ground surface suggested that anything lay beneath.
When a gas pipeline project later required topsoil-stripping in the area, archaeologist Emmet Byrnes was brought in to monitor the work. What followed was a full excavation running from 6 April to 17 September 2002. Across an area of roughly 100 by 30 metres, Byrnes and his team found charcoal-rich deposits, evidence of in situ burning, and a range of features pointing to medieval rural settlement. Five distinct phases of activity were identified. The earliest involved intercutting gullies and ditches that formed a subrectangular enclosure, the kind of boundary arrangement associated with a small enclosed field system. Alongside the field system itself, the site contained three corn-drying kilns, a metal working site, and various other features. Corn-drying kilns were a common fixture of early medieval Irish farming, used to dry grain before milling or storage, and their presence here, combined with evidence of metalworking, suggests a community that was more than self-sufficient in the basics. About 300 metres to the south-west stands the site of Uregare Church, a reminder that this corner of Limerick was once a functioning rural parish in the fullest sense.
The site sits in pasture just north of the road forming the townland boundary with Goat Island, and approximately 90 metres north-east of the boundary with Uregare. There is nothing to see at ground level; Digital Globe imagery taken between 2011 and 2013 recorded no surface remains whatsoever. The field system does, however, leave faint linear cropmarks visible on Google Earth orthoimages, the kind of ghost outlines that appear when buried features affect how grass grows above them. For anyone with an interest in reading landscapes rather than visiting monuments, those pale lines in the aerial view are the whole point.