Limerick Walls

Advance and Retire

Every stone and brick herein is a handstone, each a memorial to the smiths that shaped and placed them using skills honed over a millennium. Their work has withstood the tests of assaults, sieges, invasions and regeneration schemes. The craftsmens’ names may have been effaced by time but their legacy still supports and renders the city in good light.

Half Right and Left

Each of these images may be entirely unremarkable yet Limerick’s – and much of the nation’s – history is rooted in each. The shame is that we know as little about these past builders as they knew of the future us. We must imagine the long dead hands as they cut and built up assemblages of extinct marine lifeforms, repurposing coral reefs as limestone walls. We can imagine arms that fired bricks from estuarine sands, stacked, mortared, plastered and painted them. No particulars are recorded but we can presume many hands, many people, probably all men, erected these walls. 

Dance With Opposite

The city of Limerick has developed from a neolithic settlement on an island at the confluence of the Abbey and Shannon Rivers. The architecture of the Vikings, Scots, Normans, English and Irish has addressed administrative and urban challenges in different ways with ever-changing means. Some of this history was portrayed to a small group by Peter Carroll, principal of A2 Architects and Senior Lecturer at the School of Architecture, University of Limerick (SAUL), as he guided us on a walking tour of Limerick. It was then that my camera found walls to support his narratives. 

Dance Around

‘Limerick’s Walls’ was composed by Tomas Danaher as a four part céilí dance. It has been globally danced as ‘The Walls of Limerick’ since 1915, long after the construction of the walls abstracted in this chapbook.

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The Bracket Books chapbooks are available for online purchase through FabHappy and TheUpliftKit but perhaps you’d prefer to enquire here. They’re being issued by the calendar month, each edition in 2022 limited to 100 copies, each copy uniquely numbered and posted at the end of each month.

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