Barrow, Bottomstown, Co. Limerick

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Barrow, Bottomstown, Co. Limerick

A circle roughly six metres across, visible only from the air and only under the right conditions, marks what may be an ancient burial mound in a field of reclaimed pasture near the townland boundary between Bottomstown and Rathanny in County Limerick.

There is nothing to see at ground level. No mound, no stone, no earthwork rises above the grass. The site does not appear on Ordnance Survey Ireland historic maps at all. What survives is a cropmark, the faint differential in how plants grow over disturbed or buried ground, detectable only when viewed from above at the correct angle and in the right season, typically during dry summers when shallow-rooted crops show stress over compacted or ditch-fill soils beneath.

The site was first identified during the Bruff aerial photographic survey in 1986, recorded as Bruff 94 (AP 5/2102), when the circular cropmark became legible from the air. It sits within a cluster of five possible barrows, a barrow being a prehistoric burial mound, often of Bronze Age date, constructed of earth or stone over one or more interments. The others in the cluster are recorded under the references LI040-207002- through LI040-207005-, and a further possible earthwork lies approximately 205 metres to the north-west. The cropmark, around six metres in diameter, has since been confirmed on a Digital Globe orthoimage taken between 2011 and 2013, and again on a Google Earth image dated 28 June 2018. The record was compiled by Fiona Rooney and uploaded to the national monuments database on 29 June 2021.

There is no formal public access to this site, and nothing marks it on the ground. The most useful way to engage with it is through the aerial and satellite imagery referenced in the national monuments record, where the faint ring becomes just legible against the surrounding pasture. Those with a particular interest in aerial archaeology may find the contrast between the 1986 survey image and the more recent Google Earth orthoimage instructive, showing how consistently the cropmark has persisted over several decades despite the land being in active agricultural use. The surrounding landscape, reclaimed pasture close to a quiet townland boundary, gives little away about what may lie beneath.

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Pete F
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