Barrow (Ditch barrow), Rathmore North, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Barrows
A circular earthwork roughly 37 metres across sits in low-lying Limerick pasture, quietly ignored by the Ordnance Survey mapmakers who recorded the surrounding landscape in earlier centuries.
It does not appear on any of the historic OS maps of the area, which is itself a small puzzle worth pausing over. Its existence only became formally documented through aerial photography, the kind of oblique or overhead view that reveals what centuries of ploughing, draining, and general agricultural activity have reduced to near-invisibility at ground level.
The monument is a ditch barrow, a type of prehistoric burial mound defined not by a raised bank alone but by an inner fosse, which is essentially a circular ditch cut into the earth around a central mound. From the air, this fosse reads as a clear ring, and it is precisely that shadow-and-tone signature that gave the site away. It was identified as a circular earthwork on a 1:5,000 aerial photograph taken during survey work for the Bórd Gáis Éireann Curraghleigh West-Limerick gas pipeline, recorded as photograph number 2497. Subsequent aerial orthoimages, including OSi imagery from 2005 to 2012, a Digital Globe image from 2011 to 2013, and a Google Earth image dated 16 March 2016, all confirmed the circular form. The site sits 490 metres east of the townland boundary with Lacka and is accompanied by two related enclosure monuments lying 90 and 125 metres to the south-west. In the aerial record it appears as the northernmost of a line of three monuments, a quiet alignment that suggests this corner of Rathmore North held some significance in the prehistoric or early historic period. The record was compiled by Alison McQueen and Vera Rahilly and uploaded in November 2020.
The site sits within working pasture that has been cut through by land drains and watercourses, so the ground underfoot is likely to be wet, particularly outside the summer months. There is no formal access, and the earthwork is not signposted or managed as a visitor site. At ground level the feature may be almost imperceptible, the interior fosse having been softened over time by drainage works and agricultural activity. The clearest way to appreciate the monument is to look at the aerial orthoimages referenced in the record, which show the circular form with reasonable clarity. Those visiting the general area in search of the related enclosures to the south-west should come prepared for soft ground and the absence of any on-site interpretation.