Enclosure (Large), Garranroe, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Enclosures
A large earthwork sitting in ordinary Co. Limerick farmland tends not to announce itself.
This one, in the townland of Garranroe, is easy enough to miss at ground level, yet from above its roughly rectangular outline is clear enough to read on satellite imagery. What makes it quietly anomalous is its scale: the external bank once measured something in the region of 100 metres across, and even in its reduced state the enclosure still spans roughly 72 metres north to south and 83 metres east to west. That is considerably larger than a typical ringfort, a type of circular earthen enclosure built across Ireland from the early medieval period, and the unusual sub-rectangular shape sets it apart further still.
The site appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1840, where it is marked as a large fort, with a small house or cabin noted just four metres outside the northwest rampart. By the time the 25-inch map was revised in 1897, the cartographers described a sub-rectangular embanked enclosure. When the Archaeological Survey of Ireland inspected the site in 2000, they found a raised area defined by an earthen bank with scarped, that is, steeply cut, edges. The northern, eastern, and western banks survive, each around 8 metres wide, and are now covered in mature trees; the southern boundary is marked by a tree-lined scarped edge rather than a standing bank. Three entrance gaps are still legible, in the north, east, and southeast. No external fosse, or defensive ditch, was found. The enclosure does not stand alone in the landscape either: a potential fulacht fia, a type of ancient burnt mound associated with outdoor cooking or other communal activities, lies 150 metres to the southeast, and a ringfort sits 200 metres to the northeast. During land reclamation some 20 metres southeast of the enclosure, a quern stone used for grinding grain was recovered and is now held in the National Museum of Ireland.
The site sits in pasture on a slight south-facing slope, with open views to the north, northeast, and west, and the townland boundary between Ballygeale and Liskilly curves around its northern and western edge, a detail that sometimes signals the antiquity of an earthwork. The interior undulates, and field clearance debris has been deposited across the southern half, so the ground is uneven underfoot. The enclosure is visible on Google Earth orthophotos from June 2018 and February 2020, which gives a useful orientation before visiting. Access is across working farmland, so the usual courtesies apply.