Hilltop enclosure, Cappanahanagh, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Enclosures
On a spur of the Slieve Felim hills north of the village of Murroe, a low earthen ring sits at the very summit of a steep ridge, occupying the hilltop so completely that the enclosure and the hill seem almost to share an outline.
The monument, known on the 1840 Ordnance Survey six-inch map as Lisgorey, sits at 494 feet above sea level, and what makes it quietly peculiar is not its scale but its precision of placement: the earthwork does not merely occupy a high point, it fills it, terminating at the summit's edge on all sides and leaving the impression that the hill was shaped for exactly this purpose.
The site carries a name with considerable historical weight. Lynch, writing in 1932, identified Lios Ghuaire as one of the royal forts listed in the medieval Book of Rights, a text recording the entitlements and obligations of Irish kings, as the fort of Eibhliu, daughter of Guaire. The nineteenth-century scholar John O'Donovan recorded that the whole hillside was once called Sliabh Eibhlinne inghini Guaire, meaning the mountain range of Eibhliu, daughter of Guaire, a name that bound the landscape itself to this figure. The Ordnance Survey's own field notes, compiled for Abington Parish, described the fort as roughly fifty metres in diameter and about 0.9 metres high, composed of earth with a flat green surface, and noted that a folk tale about a man named Guaire was still circulating locally at the time of survey. Whether that Guaire was the same figure remembered in the place name, or a later local memory that had attached itself to the site, the notes do not say.
When archaeologists visited in 1999, they found a roughly circular area, approximately 26 metres north to south and 28 metres east to west, defined more by a scarped edge and steeply falling ground than by any obvious built rampart. A lis, or ringfort, of this type is a relatively common monument class in Ireland, typically associated with early medieval settlement, though hilltop examples used for enclosure or ceremonial purposes are less usual. The interior had been levelled on the east and west sides, no entrance was visible, and the whole was lightly overgrown with briars and gorse. Scrub woodland covers much of the southern and eastern edge, and by 2018 the monument's outline was barely legible on aerial imagery. A field boundary to the north still curves respectfully around the scarped edge of the enclosure, which is perhaps the clearest indication, at ground level, that something deliberate lies beneath the trees.
