Ringfort, Moymore, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Ringforts
A ringfort that has never appeared on any Ordnance Survey map sits in a pasture field in Moymore, County Limerick, invisible to anyone walking past and yet perfectly legible from the air.
Ringforts, the circular enclosed farmsteads built mainly during the early medieval period, are among the most common archaeological monument types in Ireland, but this one managed to escape cartographic record entirely, surviving instead as a ghost in the grass.
The site came to light in 1986, when an aerial photographic survey centred on the Bruff area captured a large circular crop mark in the field. Crop marks form when buried features, such as the filled-in ditches or compacted banks of an old enclosure, cause the vegetation above them to grow differently from the surrounding soil, producing patterns that only become legible when viewed from altitude. The survey reference logged it as Bruff 75, aerial photograph 4/3680. Decades later, a Google Earth orthoimage taken on 18 November 2018 confirmed it was still readable from above, showing a roughly circular area of approximately 55 metres in diameter, defined by a levelled scarp and an outer ditch. An OSi orthoimage from 2005 to 2012 adds another layer of detail: a relict field boundary or former avenue cuts across the monument at its south-east, suggesting that at some point in the intervening centuries, later agricultural activity partially overrode the older enclosure without quite erasing it. The record was compiled by Martin Fitzpatrick and uploaded in July 2020.
The site lies approximately 220 metres west of the public road that forms the townland boundary between Moymore and Kilduff. On the ground, there is likely little to see; the scarp has been levelled and the surrounding land is in ordinary agricultural use. The crop mark is the thing, and that means the site rewards attention paid to aerial imagery rather than a visit in any conventional sense. Checking Google Earth at the coordinates and comparing the faint circular trace against the surrounding field patterns gives a clearer sense of the monument than standing beside it probably would.