Barrow, Ballynamona, Co. Limerick

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Barrows

Barrow, Ballynamona, Co. Limerick

A circular mound roughly 27 metres across sits in reclaimed pasture near Ballynamona, Co. Limerick, and for most of its existence it went entirely unrecorded.

It does not appear on any Ordnance Survey Ireland historic maps, meaning that for generations of cartographers and historians combing the landscape for ancient features, this particular barrow simply did not exist on paper. A barrow, in this context, is a burial mound of prehistoric or early medieval origin, typically defined by a raised earthen bank and an encircling ditch known as a fosse. This one has both, yet it slipped through the documentary record unnoticed.

The monument only came to light in a roundabout way. In November 1984, aerial photographs were taken at a scale of 1:5000 during survey work for the Bórd Gáis Éireann Curraleigh West-Limerick gas pipeline. When those images were later examined, a circular feature appeared in the field, 225 metres east of the townland boundary with Duntryleague. Decades passed before the record was formalised. It was not until researcher Martin Fitzpatrick reviewed Google Earth orthoimagery, including an image from November 2018 and another from June 2021, that the site was properly documented and uploaded to the national record in October 2021. The 2018 image shows the raised circular form defined by its fosse, though the northern edge is cut across by an east-west field boundary. The 2021 summer image shows the monument differently, as a cropmark, the kind of soil and vegetation contrast that becomes visible in dry conditions when buried features affect how grass or crops grow above them. A second earthwork of some kind lies approximately 190 metres to the south.

Because this site sits in reclaimed agricultural pasture on private land, there is no formal public access, and the monument itself is not signposted or marked in any way on the ground. The most practical way to observe it is through Google Earth, where both the raised earthwork and the cropmark version are visible on the orthoimages cited in the record. Anyone with a genuine research interest who wants to visit the area should seek landowner permission first. The surrounding landscape near the Duntryleague boundary is quiet and agricultural, and the monument is not visible from any obvious vantage point on a public road, which is rather the point. It is a place that rewards patience with maps and aerial imagery far more than it does casual inspection.

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