Barrow (Ditch barrow), Ballynamona, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Barrows
There is a prehistoric burial ground in the wet pastures of Ballynamona, County Limerick, that has almost entirely vanished from the surface of the earth.
Nine barrows, the low mounded earthworks typically used for burial during the Bronze Age, once formed a cemetery here, arranged within a surprisingly compact corridor of land measuring roughly 240 metres north to south and just 50 metres east to west. Today, aerial imagery reveals nothing. No mounds, no ditches, no obvious trace of what was once a concentrated, deliberate landscape of the dead.
Six of the nine barrows were excavated in 1934 by Seán P. Ó Ríordáin, one of the most significant figures in twentieth-century Irish archaeology, whose findings were published in 1936. A ditch barrow, as the name suggests, is defined by a surrounding ditch rather than simply a raised mound, and this variant is among the more common funerary monument types found across Munster. The particular barrow recorded here, designated site number III in Field C, was one of the three that Ó Ríordáin left unexcavated, meaning whatever material or skeletal evidence it once held remains, theoretically, in the ground. The site sits in wet pasture roughly 100 metres west of a stream and 275 metres northwest of the townland boundary with Lissard, coordinates that are precise in the archaeological record even if the ground itself offers no visible clue.
Visitors approaching this field should be prepared for the fundamental oddness of looking at what amounts to ordinary farmland and knowing that a formally recorded Bronze Age cemetery lies beneath it. The terrain is wet pasture, so the ground underfoot is likely to be soft, particularly in the wetter months; sensible footwear matters. There is no monument to locate, no interpretive panel, and no obvious physical feature to orientate yourself against. What you are really doing, if you make the effort to come here, is standing somewhere defined entirely by what is invisible, a site whose significance exists almost entirely in the archaeological record rather than in anything you can see or touch.