Barrow (Ring Barrow), Galboola, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Barrows
On a gently rolling pasture in the townland of Galboola, County Limerick, a circular earthwork sits largely unnoticed, never once appearing on the historic Ordnance Survey Ireland maps that recorded so much else in the landscape around it.
It is a ring-barrow, a type of prehistoric funerary monument consisting of a low central mound enclosed by a circular ditch and outer bank, and it measures roughly seven metres in external diameter. Small enough to be overlooked on foot, it belongs to a group of five such monuments arranged in a loose linear cluster, spaced approximately six metres apart and oriented roughly along a northwest to southeast axis.
The existence of this particular barrow, catalogued as LI023-236005-, was not formally recognised until the Bruff aerial photographic survey of 1986, when the circular form showed up clearly from above, logged under reference Bruff 23705. That survey, which systematically examined the landscape around Bruff in County Limerick, brought a number of previously unrecorded sites to light. The cluster of five ring-barrows sits about fifteen metres northeast of the townland boundary with Rootiagh, on pasture that faces southwest. Later imagery confirmed the site's persistence in the landscape: it appeared faintly on Ordnance Survey orthoimagery taken between 2005 and 2012, and was visible again on a Google Earth image captured in March 2017. By June 2018, the vegetation cover over the monument had become noticeably denser, which tends to be how these low earthworks slowly disappear from casual view even as they remain detectable from the air.
The monument sits on private farmland, so access would require landowner permission. Ground-level visibility is limited at the best of times with earthworks this subtle, and the growing vegetation cover noted in recent imagery makes the form harder still to read from the surface. The aerial photographs from the 1986 Bruff survey, referenced as AP 4/3634, offer the clearest sense of the monument's shape and its relationship to the other four barrows in the cluster. Anyone with an interest in the wider grouping should note that all five are recorded together under the monument numbers LI023-236001 through LI023-236005, compiled by Edmond O'Donovan as part of the county's Sites and Monuments Record.