Barrow - bowl-barrow, Raheennamadra, Co. Limerick
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Barrows
A bowl-barrow, the rounded prehistoric burial mound type common across Bronze Age Ireland and Britain, once rose about five metres above the pasture at Raheennamadra in County Limerick.
By the time an emergency excavation was carried out in 1996, it had been levelled entirely to the surrounding ground. Nothing of it is visible today, not on aerial imagery from 2011 to 2013, not on Google Earth. What survives is the record of what was there, and what the ground gave up when someone finally looked.
The mound had a long paper existence before it disappeared. The Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1840 marks it as "Clogherbeg Moat," depicting a small circular raised area already intersected on its western side by a field boundary that post-dates 1700. By the 1897 edition of the twenty-five-inch survey, it appears as a flat-topped mound of only around six metres in diameter, occupying the centre of a narrow field. The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp, writing between 1916 and 1919, described it with some admiration as "a perfect little green tumulus," roughly eleven feet high with a base of around a hundred feet across, sitting above a T-shaped valley where two small streams converge. When Victor Buckley excavated the site in 1996 under licence number 96E0032, the mound was already gone, but the original dimensions he reconstructed were considerably larger than the Victorian maps suggested: approximately eighteen metres in diameter and five metres in height. At the centre of where the mound had stood, a large igneous erratic, a boulder carried and deposited by glacial movement rather than human hands, measuring around 1.5 metres square, remained in place. Its position suggested it may have carried some ritual significance for whoever built the monument. Excavation of the old ground surface revealed a roughly three-metre-square area of pyre debris, along with both cremated and uncremated human remains. Osteological analysis by Laureen Buckley identified at least four individuals: two adults from the uncremated remains, and one adult and one juvenile from the cremated material. Fragments of prehistoric pottery were also recovered.
The site lies in pasture, about ten metres south of the road that marks the townland boundary with Knocklong East. There is nothing to see at ground level, which is itself the point. The field looks like any other field in this part of Limerick. Visitors with an interest in the archaeology should use the historic Ordnance Survey maps available through the OSi or the National Library to orient themselves to where the mound once stood, and to appreciate how completely a monument that endured for millennia can vanish within a generation.