Enclosure, Crataloe West, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Enclosures
A circular earthwork in Crataloe West, County Limerick, survives today more as an idea of itself than as a legible monument.
What was once a clearly defined embanked enclosure, roughly 40 metres in diameter, has been so thoroughly altered by agricultural activity that a visitor standing at its centre might struggle to read it as anything deliberate at all. And yet, something remains.
The enclosure was recorded on the Ordnance Survey map of 1841, at which point it appeared as a complete embanked circle, the kind of feature that archaeologists loosely term a ringfort or rath, an enclosed farmstead of early medieval Ireland typically defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches. By the time the OS revisited the area for its 1923 edition, the picture had already changed: earthen field boundaries had been pushed across the eastern and southern sides, cutting into the monument and effectively truncating it. Those boundaries themselves have since been partly removed, and the enclosure has been levelled across most of its extent. The compiled survey notes, drawn together by Denis Power and uploaded in August 2012, record that the enclosing bank survives in the south-west quadrant, with an internal height of just 0.1 metres and an external height of 1.2 metres over a span of 5 metres. That modest rise in the ground is what remains of the monument's defining edge.
The site is now under rough grazing, and a modern farm trackway runs across it. There is no formal access or interpretive signage, and nothing announces the enclosure's presence to a passing eye. Anyone seeking it out should expect to work with a map and a reasonable tolerance for ambiguity, reading the slight swell of the south-western bank against the surrounding pasture. The most useful approach is to familiarise yourself with the 1841 OS map beforehand, which gives a clear sense of the original form, and then use that mental image to orient what little remains on the ground.