Barrow (Ditch barrow), Oldtown (Bennett), Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Barrows
In a field near Oldtown in County Limerick, a prehistoric burial mound makes itself known not to the naked eye but to the camera lens of a satellite orbiting overhead.
This is a ditch-barrow, a type of funerary monument consisting of a central mound surrounded by a circular ditch, and the one at Oldtown (Bennett) is visible today largely as a cropmark, the kind of ghostly impression left in growing vegetation when buried features alter the soil's moisture and nutrient levels above them, causing crops to grow differently and reveal, from altitude, the outlines of structures long since lost at ground level.
The site is one of a cluster of five possible ditch-barrows recorded in the area under the monument reference LI033-176/79----. Its existence was confirmed through aerial photography rather than excavation or field survey. The outline of the barrow shows clearly on Ordnance Survey Ireland orthoimagery captured between 2005 and 2012, and again on a Digital Globe orthophoto taken between 2011 and 2013. A Google Earth aerial photograph from 18 November 2018 also captures the cropmark distinctly. The record was compiled by Denis Power and first uploaded in August 2013, placing it within the broader national effort to document monuments that survive only as faint traces in the landscape.
For anyone making their way out to the Oldtown area, it is worth managing expectations at the outset. There is nothing at ground level that announces itself as ancient; the earthwork is too low, too eroded, or too absorbed into farmland to read as a monument in the way a standing stone or ringfort might. The best time to spot cropmark sites like this, should you have access to aerial imagery, is during dry summers when the differential growth in crops becomes most pronounced. The site sits within what is evidently a broader prehistoric landscape, and the presence of four other possible barrows nearby suggests that this corner of Limerick was once a place of some significance for the communities who buried their dead here.