Barrow (Ring Barrow), Logavinshire, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Barrows
Somewhere beneath the turf of a Co. Limerick racecourse, a prehistoric burial monument has effectively ceased to exist, at least as far as the visible world is concerned.
A ring barrow, which is broadly a circular earthen mound or bank enclosing a burial area, was recorded here on a slight north-west-facing slope at Logavinshire, on the grounds of what became a racecourse at Greenmount. By the time anyone went back to look for it properly, there was nothing left to see.
The monument was first identified during an archaeological assessment carried out in 1995 by Celie O'Rahilly, an archaeologist working for Limerick Corporation, ahead of proposed racecourse development. O'Rahilly catalogued it as Site 22 and described a low bank forming a figure-of-eight shape, orientated south-west to north-east, with a central area measuring roughly 22 metres long by 12 metres wide. The ground within sat slightly lower than the surrounding field, which sloped gently eastwards, and O'Rahilly noted the possibility that it represented a double ring barrow, two conjoined enclosures rather than one. The monument had not appeared on either the 1840 Ordnance Survey six-inch map or the 1897 twenty-five-inch revision, suggesting it was either overlooked by earlier surveyors or already too degraded to catch their attention. The site sits in notable company: a fulacht fia, a type of burnt-mound cooking site associated with Bronze Age activity, lies around 220 metres to the west, and a further enclosure has been recorded roughly 200 metres to the south-east.
When the Archaeological Survey of Ireland visited in 2000, they found no surface remains whatsoever, and a Google Earth image taken in November 2019 confirmed the same. The site, in practical terms, has been lost to ground disturbance associated with the racecourse. There is nothing to observe at the location today, and no earthwork to trace. What remains is the documentary record, O'Rahilly's 1995 description and location map, which preserve at least a paper outline of something that once broke the surface of a Limerick field long enough to be noticed once, and then never again.