Gallows, Spital-Land, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Justice & Administration
Somewhere beneath the footpaths and front gardens of a modern housing estate in Spital-Land, County Limerick, lies the ghost of a place where public executions once took place.
The site is known from historical cartography rather than any surviving physical trace, and what was once called Gallows Green has been entirely absorbed into the ordinary fabric of suburban life, with no marker to suggest what the ground once witnessed.
The evidence for this grim former use comes from two maps separated by nearly two centuries. The Down Survey, carried out in the 1650s under the direction of William Petty as a means of cataloguing Irish land for redistribution after the Cromwellian conquest, recorded the gallows or gibbet of Gallows Green on its map of St Patrick's Parish, a copy of which is held at the National Library of Ireland as MS 718. A gibbet, for those unfamiliar with the term, was the wooden frame from which condemned persons were hanged, and sometimes from which their bodies were afterwards displayed as a warning. The name Gallows Green itself follows a well-established pattern in Irish and English towns, where open ground adjacent to a settlement was set aside for public punishment and execution. By the time the Ordnance Survey produced its six-inch mapping series in 1840, the name was still being recorded for this area, confirming that the association had persisted in local knowledge for at least two hundred years after the Down Survey documented it.
There is nothing to see at the site today in any conventional sense. The housing estate that now occupies the ground gives no indication of what the Down Survey cartographers recorded here. For those interested in pursuing the history further, the Down Survey map of St Patrick's Parish can be consulted at the National Library of Ireland, and the 1840 Ordnance Survey six-inch sheets for County Limerick are freely accessible through the OSi historical mapping viewer online. Comparing the two maps side by side gives a clear sense of how a place-name carrying centuries of uncomfortable meaning can survive on paper long after the landscape itself has been transformed beyond recognition.