Barrow (Ring Barrow), Knockfennell, Co. Limerick

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Barrow (Ring Barrow), Knockfennell, Co. Limerick

Somewhere in the wet pasture of Knockfennell, close to where two land drains meet at an awkward angle, there are prehistoric burial mounds that have effectively vanished.

Not dramatically, not through excavation or development, but simply through the slow, quiet process of ground conditions and time. Orthophotography taken between 2011 and 2018 shows no trace of them. They are neither recorded on Ordnance Survey Ireland historic maps nor particularly easy to place on the modern landscape, yet their measurements, their arrangement, and their relationship to one another were carefully noted by archaeologists who walked this ground in the middle of the twentieth century.

In 1944, archaeologist M. J. O'Kelly described the complex as a very low rectangular platform enclosed by a shallow fosse, a fosse being the ditch or trench cut around a monument. The platform measured roughly 22.8 metres north to south by 13.7 metres east to west, with no recognisable entrance. Clustered at its southern end, and sharing their ditches with it, were three ring-barrows, the term for low burial mounds surrounded by a circular or oval ditch. One was oval in plan, measuring about 13.7 by 7 metres; two were circular, each around 7.3 metres in diameter. O'Kelly noted that the whole group sat just beyond the edge of an extensive marsh. Five years later, Ó Ríordáin and MacDermott formally identified the site as Site Y in their 1949 survey, cataloguing it alongside two further ring-barrows on the same platform. The relationship between the rectangular enclosure and the barrows cut into its surface is unusual, and the precise function of that platform remains unexplained.

The site lies approximately 160 metres south-west of the townland boundary with Ballingoola, in low-lying ground that is described as wet pasture. Given that the monuments were already described as very low and shallow when O'Kelly recorded them in the 1940s, and that they are no longer visible from the air, any surface trace on the ground today is likely to be extremely subtle, if present at all. The marshy character of the surrounding land would make access difficult in wetter months. Anyone coming here is essentially looking at a piece of agricultural field, trusting that what lies beneath it was, at some point, considered significant enough to be carefully built, and later carefully recorded.

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