Burial mound, Raheennamadra, Co. Limerick

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Burial Sites

Burial mound, Raheennamadra, Co. Limerick

At the summit of Knockaunatarriff, a modest hill in County Limerick rising to 444 feet above sea level, a burial mound sits in open pasture with an oddly layered profile that sets it apart from the flatter earthworks more commonly encountered across the Irish midlands.

What makes it quietly curious is the structure itself: when the antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp examined it in 1919, he recorded that the southern mound, the better preserved of two, rises in three distinct stages, each step adding roughly five feet, then five feet, then three feet, to reach a total height of around thirteen feet on its southern side. A shallow fosse, essentially a low ditch, traces its base, and the flat summit measures about thirteen feet across. The two mounds together span roughly ninety feet, separated by a fence that had already been erected by the time Westropp visited.

The site appears to have attracted little formal attention before the late nineteenth century. It is absent from the Ordnance Survey's first six-inch map edition of 1840, which suggests it was either overlooked or considered unremarkable by the surveyors of that period. By the time of the 1897 twenty-five-inch edition, however, it had been recorded as a small oval mound, and an OS trigonometric station marking the spot height had been placed at its centre, lending the ancient earthwork an accidental second life as a surveying reference point. The mound sits immediately east of the townland boundary with Mitchelstowndown North, and within a short distance lie further monuments: a possible second burial mound just four metres to the north, and a ringfort, a circular enclosed settlement of the early medieval period, about twenty-five metres to the north-east.

The monument is set in agricultural pasture, and aerial photographs from 2002 and 2003 held by the Archaeological Survey of Ireland show the landscape context clearly. More recent satellite imagery from 2011 to 2013 indicates the area around the mound had become heavily overgrown, so anyone approaching on foot should expect rougher ground and reduced visibility of the earthwork's finer details. The three-stage profile described by Westropp is the thing to look for, particularly from the southern approach where the height is greatest. The proximity of the ringfort and the second possible mound to the north suggests this hilltop was a place of some significance over a long stretch of time, even if the precise nature and date of the burial mound itself remain unresolved.

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