Enclosure, Garrane More, Co. Limerick

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Garrane More, Co. Limerick

Some ancient sites announce themselves with standing stones or earthen banks you can lean against and photograph.

This one, in a field of pasture in Garrane More, County Limerick, does no such thing. It appears on no Ordnance Survey map, and by 2018 it had become invisible even to satellite imagery. What we know of it exists almost entirely because, on one particular day in 1986, an aircraft flew over south Limerick and someone was paying attention.

The site was identified during the Bruff aerial photographic survey of 1986, recorded under reference AP 4/3679. From the air, a circular feature roughly 22 metres in diameter became apparent, its outline defined by a scarp, essentially a low slope or edge in the ground surface, running from the north, around through the east, and down to the southwest. Field walls, built at some later point in the agricultural history of the area, cut across the feature at its northern and western sides, which partly explains why it reads so poorly at ground level. A second enclosure, catalogued separately as LI024-148002, sits immediately to the south. The site itself sits in the northwest corner of a pasture field, approximately 10 metres south of the townland boundary with Nicker. Circular enclosures of this general type are a common enough feature of the Irish landscape; they include ringforts, which served as farmsteads and defended homesteads from the early medieval period onward, though without further investigation this particular site cannot be assigned confidently to any one period or function.

Because the feature is not visible on Google Earth imagery from June 2018, a visit in ordinary conditions offers little to see without knowing precisely what to look for. The scarp that defined it from the air may still be detectable as a subtle change in the ground surface, particularly after rain or in low winter light, when slight variations in the land tend to show more clearly. The field walls intersecting the northern and western edges are the most tangible physical remnants. Access would require permission from the landowner, and the location in the northwest corner of a pasture field, close to the Nicker townland boundary, is the most useful navigational reference available. Martin Fitzpatrick compiled the record, uploaded in July 2020, and the Bruff survey image remains the most informative document relating to the site.

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