Barrow (Ring Barrow), Falleenadatha, Co. Limerick

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Barrow (Ring Barrow), Falleenadatha, Co. Limerick

At 1,524 feet above sea level on the summit of Cullaun in the Slievefelim Mountains, a low, flat-topped mound sits on the townland boundary of Falleenadatha, quietly raising a question that has never been fully resolved: is this a prehistoric ring barrow, a boundary cairn thrown up by Victorian surveyors, or something else altogether?

A ring barrow is a burial mound, typically Bronze Age in origin, defined by a surrounding ditch or fosse, and the feature here fits that description well enough to be recorded as one. But its position immediately east of an Ordnance Survey triangulation station complicates the picture considerably.

When the Archaeological Survey of Ireland examined the site in 1999, they measured a circular, flat-topped mound of earth and stone roughly eight metres in diameter and just thirty centimetres high, encircled by a fosse, the ditch that classically defines a ring barrow, with an overall width of 6.3 metres and a depth of half a metre. A narrow routeway, only sixty centimetres wide and cut to a shallow depth of fifteen centimetres, runs from the outer edge of the fosse up to the top of the mound on its eastern side, and this is considered a relatively recent addition rather than any ancient feature. The OS 25-inch map marks the earthwork simply as "Mound" and depicts it as a small oval standing right on the townland boundary. Compiled for the record by Alison McQueen and Vera Rahilly in 2020, the site note raises the possibility that the mound may actually be a boundary cairn built by the Ordnance Survey itself during its nineteenth-century mapping of Ireland, constructed to mark the meeting point of townlands rather than to cover the dead.

The mound sits in rough mountain bog on a slight north-west-facing slope, and the terrain is accordingly wet and open. It remains visible in satellite imagery, including Digital Globe orthophotos from 2011 to 2013 and a Google Earth image from November 2018, where it shows as an oval area of differential vegetation growth. There is no formal access path, and the bog makes for slow going underfoot, so appropriate footwear matters. The ambiguity of the site is, in a sense, its most interesting quality: something that looks prehistoric may turn out to be a surveyor's practical solution to a cartographic problem, or the two explanations may not be mutually exclusive at all.

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Falleenadatha, Co. Limerick
52.66791914,-8.26036766

Ref: LI00256

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