Barrow (Ring Barrow), Ballingoola, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Barrows
A circular earthwork roughly ten metres across sits in flat pasture near Ballingoola, in County Limerick, and by most measures it barely exists at all.
It never appeared on historic Ordnance Survey Ireland maps, it was only formally identified from the air, and by the time satellite imagery was checked again in mid-2018, its outline had vanished entirely from view. What remained in between those dates was just visible enough to confirm that something is there, or was, beneath the grass.
A ring-barrow is a burial monument, typically prehistoric, consisting of a low central mound surrounded by a circular ditch and sometimes an outer bank. They are cousins of the more familiar round barrow but distinguished by the emphasis on that encircling earthwork rather than the height of the mound itself. This particular example, recorded under the reference LI023-065----, came to light through the Bruff aerial photographic survey of 1986, catalogued as Bruff 119 and captured on aerial photograph AP 4/3642. The survey identified the feature as circular, with an external diameter of approximately ten metres. It sits around 150 metres east of a small tributary that runs northward to join the Camoge River, and a second ring-barrow of the same general type lies about 115 metres to the southwest, suggesting this quiet stretch of farmland was once a place of some significance to the communities who shaped it. The record was compiled by Edmond O'Donovan and uploaded to the national monuments database in August 2020.
For anyone hoping to locate this monument on the ground, the experience is likely to be humbling. There is no marker, no signage, and no obvious feature to aim for in what is otherwise ordinary grazing land. The outline showed up on an OSi orthoimage from between 2005 and 2012, and was still detectable on Google Earth imagery from March 2017, but had disappeared from the most recent image taken in June 2018, most probably due to seasonal variation in grass cover, soil moisture, or crop growth affecting the visibility of the underlying earthwork from above. That kind of now-you-see-it, now-you-don-t quality is not unusual with cropmark or soilmark sites, where the evidence is legible to a camera at altitude in one growing season and entirely absent the next. The companion barrow to the southwest, also unverified at ground level, compounds the sense that this is archaeology best appreciated at a distance, either through the archive images or by understanding what the aerial survey revealed.