Barrow, Cromwell, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Barrows
On the southern slope of Cromwell Hill in County Limerick, there is a prehistoric burial monument that most people walking or driving past would never suspect exists.
It leaves no impression on the ground that the eye can follow, no raised earthwork, no hollow, no scatter of stones. Its presence is known almost entirely because of what a camera recorded from the air decades ago.
The site is classified as a ring-barrow, a type of funerary monument typically consisting of a low central mound enclosed by a circular ditch and outer bank, and associated broadly with prehistoric burial practice in Ireland. This particular example sits about 65 metres west of the road that forms the townland boundary with Garryncahera, in improved pasture that has clearly been worked and drained over many generations. It is the northernmost of a cluster of four possible barrows in the area, all loosely aligned on a northwest to southeast axis. None of them appear on Ordnance Survey Ireland historic maps, which suggests they were either already invisible at ground level by the time those surveys were conducted, or simply overlooked. The site was identified in 1986 through an aerial photographic survey carried out from Bruff, recorded under the reference Bruff 115.05 AP 5/2022. Subsequent orthophotography taken between 2005 and 2012, as well as Google Earth imagery, confirmed that no surface remains were visible by that point. The record was compiled by Martin Fitzpatrick and uploaded in April 2021.
For anyone curious enough to seek it out, the location is in ordinary farmland and there is nothing to see at ground level in the conventional sense. The drainage channel running northwest to southeast just to the south of the site is perhaps the most reliable landmark in the immediate vicinity. The interest here is less about what you can observe on foot and more about what the landscape conceals beneath an unremarkable surface of improved grass. The aerial photograph held in the Bruff survey archive remains the closest thing to a visible record of this monument's form.