Barrow (Ring Barrow), Castlefarm, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Barrows
Of the four prehistoric ring-barrows that once stood in a meadow field at Castlefarm in County Limerick, three were levelled without ceremony to make way for farm machinery.
Nothing was found when they were cleared away. One survives, a very slight mound enclosed by a shallow fosse, its overall diameter a modest six metres. It sits in the kind of landscape that does not encourage lingering: wet lowland, a meadow, the sort of ground that turns soft underfoot after rain.
A ring-barrow is a low burial mound, typically of Bronze Age origin, defined by a surrounding ditch or fosse and sometimes an outer bank. The Castlefarm examples were recorded in 1942 and 1943 by the archaeologist M. J. O'Kelly, who noted both the cluster of smaller barrows and a larger associated enclosure nearby, a circular earthen platform some 93 metres in overall diameter, surrounded by two banks and two fosses and rising to a maximum height of about 1.5 metres above the fosse-bottom. O'Kelly observed that no entrance to the enclosure was recognisable, and that drainage trenches and a fence had already cut through its western and southern defences. That enclosure, recorded under the reference LI032-049001, remains detectable today as a cropmark on Digital Globe aerial photographs, the buried ditches betraying themselves in dry summers through differential growth in the vegetation above them. The three levelled barrows, by contrast, leave no visible trace at all from the air.
The surviving ring-barrow is set in a working meadow, so access is subject to the usual courtesies around private farmland. The enclosure and its cropmark are best appreciated through aerial imagery rather than on the ground, where the earthworks are subtle and the wet terrain makes inspection difficult outside of dry spells. If you do visit the general area, the landscape itself is unremarkable at first glance, which is part of what makes the record of loss here worth pausing over. Three monuments were removed for agricultural convenience within living memory of O'Kelly's survey, and the notes are matter-of-fact about it: the barrows were levelled, nothing was found, and the meadow continued as a meadow.