Barrow, Spittle, Co. Limerick

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Barrows

Barrow, Spittle, Co. Limerick

Some archaeological sites are defined by what can be seen.

This one is defined almost entirely by what cannot. In a pasture in the townland of Spittle, in south County Limerick, there is a site recorded as a possible barrow, a type of prehistoric burial mound typically raised over the remains of the dead, that has left no visible trace on the ground whatsoever. No earthwork, no raised profile, no crop mark legible to a casual eye. Its existence rests on a single moment of aerial observation, decades old, and has not been confirmed since.

The site came to light on aerial photographs taken on 3 November 1984 as part of a survey conducted for the Bórd Gáis Éireann Curraleigh West-Limerick gas pipeline project, recorded in the survey series as BGE 1/5000, image 2609, No. 372. Analysts examining those photographs identified what appeared to be the remains of a barrow, 350 metres east of the townland boundary with Ballylanders and roughly 120 metres south of Coolcormick House. The feature never appeared on historic Ordnance Survey Ireland maps, which suggests it was already reduced beyond cartographic notice long before the nineteenth century surveys were made. A related earthwork, catalogued separately as LI049-172----, sits approximately 165 metres to the south-east. When later satellite imagery was consulted, including Digital Globe orthoimages taken between 2011 and 2013 and Google Earth imagery from the same period, no surface remains could be identified at all. The site was formally compiled by Martin Fitzpatrick and uploaded to the record in October 2021.

Because the feature is located in private pasture with no public access point and nothing visible at ground level, there is little a visitor could practically observe. The interest here is less in the landscape itself and more in what the record represents: a site that exists almost entirely as a bureaucratic artefact, preserved in a pipeline survey photograph taken on a November afternoon forty years ago. The nearest point of orientation is the local road that passes roughly 20 metres to the north. Anyone curious about the broader archaeology of the area would do better to seek out the confirmed earthwork to the south-east, though access to that too would require local enquiry.

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Pete F
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