Earthwork, Inchacoomb, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Ritual/Ceremonial
Somewhere beneath the concrete and corrugated iron of a working farmyard in Inchacoomb, County Limerick, lies the ghost of an oval earthwork that has not been visible to the naked eye for decades, possibly longer.
It survives now only as a record on a Victorian-era map, a cartographic trace of something that once shaped the ground here and has since been absorbed entirely by agricultural change.
The earthwork appears on the 1897 edition of the Ordnance Survey Ireland 25-inch map as an oval form measuring roughly 35 metres northwest to southeast and 26 metres northeast to southwest, its outline defined by a scarp, a low natural or man-made slope cut into the ground, running from the southeast around through west to north. It sits approximately 280 metres southwest of the stream that marks the townland boundary with Boolanlisheen, with a separate enclosure recorded some 300 metres to the east. Notably, it does not appear on the earlier 1840 edition of the OSi 6-inch map, which raises questions about whether it was simply missed by the earlier surveyors, or whether the feature was more legible on the ground by the later nineteenth century. By the time Digital Globe and Google Earth orthoimages were captured between 2011 and 2013, nothing remained at the surface; the area had been taken over by modern farm buildings. The record was compiled by Martin Fitzpatrick and uploaded to the national monuments database in October 2021.
There is, in practical terms, nothing to see at this location. The site sits on private farmland, and the earthwork itself has no visible surface expression. Its value now is almost entirely archival, a reminder that the rural landscape of County Limerick holds countless features that slipped out of the record before archaeology could properly account for them. For those interested in this kind of cartographic detective work, comparing the 1897 25-inch OSi maps with modern satellite imagery across the county reveals how much has quietly disappeared, absorbed into the ordinary business of farming across successive generations.