Enclosure, Ballinlee, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Enclosures
There is almost nothing to see at Ballinlee in County Limerick, and that, in a way, is precisely the point.
Somewhere beneath a stretch of ordinary pasture, close to the meeting point of four townlands, the faint outline of an ancient enclosure survives only as a cropmark, the kind of ghost that appears not to the naked eye but through the lens of an aerial camera or the cold geometry of a satellite image. The monument is gone in any physical sense, levelled long ago, yet the ground still remembers it.
The Ordnance Survey's 25-inch map once depicted a roughly circular platform here, measuring approximately 33 metres north to south and 38 metres east to west, defined by a fosse, which is a defensive ditch cut around the perimeter of the enclosure. A post-1700 field boundary running north to south cuts through the monument from the south-west, which helps explain at least some of the damage. The site came to wider attention through aerial photography associated with the Bórd Gáis Éireann Curraleigh West-Limerick gas pipeline survey, during which it was recorded and classified as a platform ringfort. A platform ringfort is a specific type of early medieval Irish settlement, one in which the interior ground level was raised above the surrounding terrain, set apart from the more common circular earthworks that survive as visible banks and ditches across the Irish countryside. Orthophotos produced by Ordnance Survey Ireland between 2005 and 2012, as well as Google Earth imagery, confirm the circular cropmark still legible in the field. The record was compiled by Fiona Rooney and uploaded in April 2021.
The site sits in pasture roughly 10 metres west of the townland boundary with Ballygrennan, and visitors approaching on foot should be aware they are crossing working farmland. There is no physical monument to examine at ground level; what the site offers is a lesson in how to read a landscape for things that are no longer there. The cropmark, visible when differential moisture or growth patterns in the grass betray the buried fosse below, is best captured in dry summers when crop stress reveals the underlying archaeology. For those with access to the OSi orthophotos or Google Earth, the circular form remains a quiet but legible presence in an otherwise unremarkable field.