Barrow (Ring Barrow), Bunavie, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Barrows
A ring barrow is, at its simplest, a prehistoric burial mound enclosed by a circular or near-circular ditch and bank, and they are scattered across Ireland in considerable numbers.
What makes the one at Bunavie, in County Limerick, quietly distinctive is its shape: not a full circle but a D, with a straight side running roughly northeast to southwest across one edge. It sits on a north-facing slope in damp pasture, which is an unpromising setting for a monument that may be thousands of years old, and the ground conditions have not been kind to it. The outer bank, no more than 25 centimetres high on its interior face and 15 centimetres on the exterior, is reasonably legible on its southwestern and western arc but fades almost entirely as it curves toward the northwest. A field drain has cut across the eastern side, truncating the monument further and leaving the inner fosse, the shallow encircling ditch, partially infilled with up-cast drainage material on its southern end.
The site was recorded and compiled by Denis Power, with details uploaded to the national monuments record in December 2013. The measurements are modest: the D-shaped interior spans roughly 4 metres on both its straight and curved axes, the inner fosse is just under 3 metres wide and a quarter of a metre deep, and the outer bank is around 2.4 metres wide. These are not dramatic figures, and the barrow would be easy to walk past without registering it at all. What adds a layer of interest is the proximity of a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead commonly built in early medieval Ireland, located approximately 24 metres to the north-northwest and recorded separately under its own monument number. Whether the two features are related in any meaningful way is not established, but their closeness is the sort of thing that repays a moment's thought about how this particular patch of Limerick was used and reused across very different periods.
Access is across working agricultural land, so permission from the landowner should be sought before visiting. The monument sits in damp pasture on a slope, and the ground is likely to be wet for much of the year, so appropriate footwear matters. The interior is level, which makes the surrounding bank and fosse easier to read once you are standing inside the circuit, though the truncated eastern edge will require some imagination to complete. The southwestern arc of the outer bank is the best-preserved section and the clearest place to begin orienting yourself to what remains.