Barrow (Ring Barrow), Coolnashamroge, Co. Limerick

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Barrow (Ring Barrow), Coolnashamroge, Co. Limerick

A prehistoric burial monument sits in a gently rolling field in County Limerick that gives almost nothing away to the naked eye.

The ring-barrow at Coolnashamroge, a circular earthwork of the kind used in later prehistory to mark the graves of the dead, measures roughly seven metres north to south and eight metres east to west. A ring-barrow typically consists of a low central mound enclosed by a circular ditch and outer bank, the whole arrangement intended to set a burial apart from the surrounding landscape. At Coolnashamroge, that arrangement is now so thoroughly absorbed into the reclaimed pasture that it does not appear on Ordnance Survey Ireland maps, was invisible on aerial orthoimages taken between 2005 and 2013, and cannot be picked out on Google Earth at all. The only record of it as a visible cropmark or earthwork feature comes from a single aerial photographic survey carried out over the Bruff area in 1986.

That 1986 survey, recorded as Bruff 26103 and AP 4/3665, is what brought this particular monument to light, and it sits within a remarkably dense concentration of similar sites. This barrow is one of twelve ring-barrows spread across three adjacent fields, forming a funerary cluster roughly 200 metres in diameter, with a companion barrow lying just 26 metres to the south-east. A further cemetery of twelve ring-barrows lies 300 metres to the south-east across the townland boundary in Ballyphilip, which falls within the Clanwilliam barony. The proximity of these two groups suggests that this corner of Limerick was treated as significant burial ground over an extended period in prehistory, though the precise date of either cemetery is not recorded in the survey notes. The cultivated grass cover visible on a Google Earth image from June 2018 points to the land having been reclaimed sometime in the late twentieth or early twenty-first century, which accounts for why so little of the monument survives above ground today.

For anyone attempting to locate this site, it lies approximately 160 metres north of the townland boundary with Ballyphilip, within a large rectangular field. Because the barrow is not visible on satellite imagery or standard mapping, there is no obvious feature to aim for on the ground, and the reclaimed pasture offers no surface indication of what lies beneath. The record was compiled by Edmond O'Donovan and uploaded to the national monuments database in September 2020, so the most useful starting point is the Sites and Monuments Record entry, which carries the reference coordinates and the 1986 aerial photograph showing the circular feature before the land was fully levelled.

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