Barrow (Ring Barrow), Ballybricken, Co. Limerick

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Barrow (Ring Barrow), Ballybricken, Co. Limerick

An electricity pylon stands five metres from one of County Limerick's quietly surviving prehistoric burial monuments, a juxtaposition that somehow makes the thing more arresting rather than less.

The ring barrow at Ballybricken sits in level pasture, its roughly circular form measuring around eighteen metres north-northwest to south-southeast and seventeen metres across the opposite axis. A ring barrow, for those unfamiliar with the term, is a low earthen mound or flat central area enclosed by one or more banks and ditches, typically associated with Bronze Age funerary practice. This one retains a good deal of its original complexity, with a scarped inner edge, an earthen bank, a wide fosse or ditch between that bank and an outer one, and traces of the outer bank still visible in several arcs around the monument.

The detail recorded by Denis Power, who compiled the site notes uploaded in October 2013, gives a clear picture of what the centuries have done to the structure. The inner bank still rises to an external height of around 2.45 metres on its better-preserved sides, though it drops noticeably toward the east-northeast. The wide intervening fosse, with an overall width of over sixteen metres, remains well defined across most of its circuit, though it becomes shallow on the same eastern arc and is waterlogged and fenced off toward the west-northwest. The outer bank is more fragmentary, surviving in intermittent stretches to the northwest through northeast and again to the southeast and south. A land drain and a field boundary have cut through it on the west-northwest side, and a dry linear depression truncates the outer bank's exterior between the south-southeast and south-southwest. The monument has, in short, been nibbled at by the ordinary operations of farming across a very long period.

The site sits in open pasture with a clear view toward Knockroe Hill to the east-northeast, which gives some sense of the deliberateness of its original placement in the landscape. Because it is in working farmland, access would require permission from the landowner, and the waterlogged fosse on the western side means the circuit cannot be walked in its entirety in wet conditions. The outer bank is easiest to trace in low winter light, when shadows pick out earthwork profiles that would be lost in summer growth. The pylon to the southeast is visible from some distance and can serve as an unexpected landmark when locating the monument from a nearby road.

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