Barrow, Carrickittle, Co. Limerick

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Barrows

Barrow, Carrickittle, Co. Limerick

A ring-barrow roughly the width of a large room sits in improved pasture in Carrickittle, County Limerick, and would be almost entirely unknown were it not for a single aerial survey flown over the area in 1986.

It does not appear on any historic Ordnance Survey Ireland maps, and it cannot be seen on Google Earth imagery. What reveals it, just barely, is the crop above it: a faint circular mark, approximately 7.5 metres in diameter, picked out in the differential growth of grass over ground that was once disturbed by human hands, probably in prehistoric times.

A ring-barrow is a low burial mound enclosed by a surrounding ditch or bank, a form found across Ireland and Britain and generally associated with the Bronze Age, though some examples date to the Iron Age. This particular example came to light through the Bruff aerial photographic survey, catalogued as Bruff 93.01, and was recorded as part of the national monuments survey process. The site carries the reference LI033-125---- and sits roughly 90 metres northeast of the townland boundary with Cromwell. A second, possibly unclassified barrow lies about 30 metres to the southeast, suggesting the two features may form a loose funerary grouping, though the southeastern example has not been formally classified. The record was compiled by Martin Fitzpatrick and uploaded in April 2021.

Because the site is located in working agricultural land and leaves no surface trace legible to the naked eye, there is little to see from ground level. The cropmark that identifies it is only discernible in aerial or orthographic photography taken under the right conditions, and even those images, captured by Ordnance Survey Ireland between 2005 and 2012, show only a faint circular shadow. For anyone interested in the archaeology of this part of Limerick, the site is best understood in conjunction with the aerial survey images rather than as a destination in itself. Its value lies less in what can be visited and more in what it quietly indicates: that the landscape here was meaningful to communities long before any surviving record begins.

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Pete F
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