Barrow (Ring Barrow), Cahercorney, Co. Limerick

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Barrow (Ring Barrow), Cahercorney, Co. Limerick

A field in Cahercorney, County Limerick, contains the almost imperceptible remains of an ancient burial monument, one so worn down by time that its outline no longer shows up on aerial photography.

What survives of this ring barrow, a circular earthwork enclosing a burial, typically from the Bronze Age, amounts to little more than a faint depression and a barely-there bank, gapped in several places and levelled by centuries of agricultural use. The interior sits flush with the surrounding field, and any sense of an original entrance has long since been erased.

When the archaeologist O'Kelly surveyed the area in 1942 and 1943, he catalogued this monument as No. 1 within a complex of twelve separate monuments clustered in the same townland. His description, published in 1943, noted that this barrow and its near-identical neighbour, No. 2, each measured roughly 60 feet, or 18.3 metres, in overall diameter, with very shallow fosses, the term for the ditches that typically surround such enclosures, running around their perimeters. O'Kelly observed that neither monument had been marked on the Ordnance Survey maps of the time, a detail that points to just how inconspicuous both features already were. Of the twelve monuments in the complex, most were located in a low-lying marsh, though this one and a handful of others occupied slightly different ground.

By the time an aerial survey photograph was taken in January 2003, the outline of the monument had become undetectable even from above, and that situation appears unchanged. For anyone visiting the Cahercorney area with an interest in early Irish archaeology, the surrounding complex as a whole, recorded under the reference LI032-073001 through to 013, gives a sense of the ritual and funerary activity that once concentrated in this unassuming stretch of County Limerick countryside. On the ground, the evidence demands patience and a certain tolerance for near-invisibility; the landscape here does not offer obvious spectacle, but the sheer density of monuments recorded in one small area is itself quietly remarkable.

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