Enclosure, Dunganville Upper, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Enclosures
On a sloping hillside in County Limerick, close to where the townland of Dunganville Upper meets Glenastar, something appears and disappears depending on when you look.
A possible ancient enclosure sits in hilly pasture here, and its very existence is a matter of timing: visible in a Google Earth orthoimage captured on 20 October 2010, it had vanished entirely from view by the following image taken on 8 April 2015. It does not appear in Ordnance Survey Ireland orthoimages from 2005 to 2012, nor in Digital Globe images from 2011 to 2013. This flickering in and out of the record is not unusual for cropmark sites, where buried features betray themselves only under specific combinations of dry weather, low sun angle, and the right stage of crop or grass growth.
What makes this particular site quietly compelling is the long paper trail that suggests something was once here. The first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1840 shows a small polygonal-shaped field on this ground, measuring roughly 22 metres north to south and 20 metres east to west. By the revised 25-inch edition of 1897, the same feature is rendered as a roughly circular field. Neither edition flags it as an antiquity, and no subsequent OSi mapping has done so either. It was compiled as a possible monument, reference LI028-194 (a separate, larger enclosure identified nearby to the south-east), only in recent years, with researcher Edmond O'Donovan uploading the record in September 2020. The surrounding landscape adds some weight to the possibility: a fort known as Lisheennabinna lies approximately 420 metres to the south-east, and another recently identified large enclosure sits 220 metres in the same direction. Enclosures of this kind, roughly circular or polygonal earthworks, were built throughout early medieval Ireland as farmsteads or ringforts, and tend to cluster in areas of sustained agricultural settlement.
There is no formal access to this site, and given its ambiguous status, a visitor should arrive with modest expectations. The enclosure sits in working pasture, so any approach would require landowner permission. The boundary area between Dunganville Upper and Glenastar in this part of Limerick is quiet hill country, and the chief interest here is less the monument itself than the act of looking: reading a slope of grass for the faint outlines of something that shows itself only occasionally, and only from the right angle, in the right season.