Enclosure, Clogher West, Co. Limerick

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Clogher West, Co. Limerick

There is something quietly telling about a site that has effectively vanished twice: once physically, and once from the maps.

A low-lying patch of improved pasture in Clogher West, County Limerick, sits just 55 metres south of a watercourse marking the townland boundary with Cloonbrien, and what was once recorded there as a D-shaped enclosure is now invisible, both on aerial photography taken between 2005 and 2012 and on a Google Earth image from September 2020. What was here, exactly, remains genuinely uncertain.

The site first appears with any clarity on the 1897 edition of the Ordnance Survey 25-inch map, where it is drawn as a D-shaped area roughly 19 metres on its longer axis and 15 metres east to west, enclosed by a curving field wall to the north, east and south-east, with a field boundary running to the west. Notably, the earlier 1840 six-inch OS map records nothing at all at this location. The National Museum of Ireland's topographical files complicate the picture further: they mention the discovery of an 18th-century millstone in the area, and note that a ringfort, a type of early medieval circular enclosure typically used as a farmstead, was levelled here in 1968. That ringfort had appeared on the 1924 map as an oval enclosure. Whether the D-shaped feature of 1897 and the ringfort of 1924 are the same thing, or whether the site was always something more modest, a small post-1700 field enclosure rather than any ancient monument, is a question the surviving evidence cannot settle. A related enclosure recorded as LI039-061 lies 225 metres to the north-west.

For anyone inclined to visit, the landscape here offers little in the way of visible archaeology. The site lies in ordinary improved farmland, and the enclosure itself leaves no trace on the ground that modern survey methods have been able to detect. What the place does offer is a useful lesson in how the Irish countryside holds and loses its past simultaneously: a millstone turns up, a ringfort is bulldozed, and the maps quietly disagree with one another across eight decades.

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