Barrow (Ring Barrow), Friarstown, Co. Limerick

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Barrow (Ring Barrow), Friarstown, Co. Limerick

A prehistoric burial monument that never appeared on any Ordnance Survey map of Ireland is an unusual thing.

For most of the modern era, this ring-barrow in the townland of Friarstown, County Limerick, was effectively invisible to the cartographic record, sitting quietly in a small flat field on undulating pasture without ever attracting official notice. A ring-barrow, for context, is a low circular earthen mound surrounded by a ditch and outer bank, typically associated with Bronze Age burial practice, and they are scattered across the Irish landscape in considerable numbers. This one, however, slipped through the net entirely until aerial observation brought it to light.

The monument was identified during the Bruff aerial photographic survey in 1986, recorded under the reference Bruff 13402 (AP 4/3656). That survey captured what ground-level inspection and map-making had missed for generations. The site sits approximately 245 metres north of the Camoge River, close to the townland boundary with Ballingoola, and lies just seven metres east of a separate enclosure monument (LI023-214). It does not appear on historic Ordnance Survey Ireland maps, and when a more recent orthoimage was taken between 2005 and 2012, the ring-barrow remained invisible even then. It was only on the most recent Google Earth orthoimages, taken in March 2016 and again in June 2018, that the monument could once more be clearly made out from above. The record was compiled by Edmond O'Donovan and uploaded to the national monuments database in September 2020.

The site is on private agricultural land in pasture, so access would require the landowner's permission. Its presence is most reliably read from aerial imagery rather than from the ground, where the low earthwork profile can be difficult to distinguish from ordinary field undulation. Anyone consulting the Google Earth images from 2016 or 2018 will find the circular form discernible in the field. The proximity of the related enclosure monument to the west suggests this corner of Friarstown may repay closer archaeological attention, though for now both sites remain known largely through the photographs that first revealed them.

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