Barrow (Ring Barrow), Ballingoola, Co. Limerick

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Barrow (Ring Barrow), Ballingoola, Co. Limerick

A circular earthwork eight metres across sits in wet pasture near Ballingoola, County Limerick, so faint that it never made it onto the Ordnance Survey's historic maps.

It is easy to miss on the ground, and yet overhead, whether on aerial photography from 1986 or satellite imagery taken decades later, that quiet ring in the grass quietly persists, century after century.

A ring-barrow is a burial mound, typically prehistoric in origin, defined by a circular bank or ditch surrounding a central mound, often the last resting place of a cremated individual or a place marked for ritual purposes. This particular example was noted by the archaeologists Seán P. Ó Ríordáin and Máire MacDermott in 1949, who described it as a barrow set upon an irregularly-shaped platform, marking it as site X in their survey. Its absence from the historic Ordnance Survey maps suggests it was either too subdued a feature to be recorded by earlier cartographers or had already been reduced significantly by agricultural activity by the time those surveys were carried out. A second ring-barrow lies roughly 115 metres to the north-east, hinting that this corner of the Camoge valley may once have held greater significance than its current appearance suggests.

The site lies in wet pasture, ten metres north of a land drain and thirty metres east of a tributary of the Camoge River, so the ground underfoot is likely to be soft, particularly in the wetter months. The earthwork itself is described as faint, with a diameter of approximately eight metres visible on Digital Globe orthophotos taken between 2011 and 2013 and on Google Earth imagery from June 2018. A visitor approaching from the road should look for the subtle swell of a circular rise rather than any dramatic mounding. The companion ring-barrow to the north-east, recorded separately as LI023-239, makes this a rewarding area for those with an eye for low earthworks and a tolerance for damp fields.

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