Barrow, Tomdeely North, Co. Limerick

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Barrows

Barrow, Tomdeely North, Co. Limerick

A low oval mound in a County Limerick field would not ordinarily attract much attention.

This one, sitting in gently undulating pasture in Tomdeely North with the River Deel less than a kilometre to the east and the Shannon Estuary visible to the north, went entirely unrecorded on the Ordnance Survey's historic mapping. It was not a known monument, not a marked feature, not anything official cartography had thought worth noting. What made someone look more closely was the proposed route of an ESB power line.

In 1999, archaeologist Celie O'Rahilly was walking that proposed route when she identified the mound as a possible enclosure, logging it as Site 1 in her survey. What she described was an oval-shaped stony mound, roughly 16 metres across on its east-west axis, defined by a low bank running around much of its perimeter from the northwest, around the north and east, and back down through the south and southwest. The bank incorporates some natural rock outcrop as well as loose stones, a portion of which may simply be the accumulated result of field clearance over many generations. A nearby field boundary runs close to the southern edge, and a gallops track, the kind used for exercising racehorses, sits about 10 metres to the east. The cautious professional language used to describe the site is worth noting: it is a "possible barrow" or a "possible burial mound or cairn." A barrow, in the Irish archaeological sense, is a prehistoric earthen or stone mound raised over a burial, and the form here, an enclosed mound with a surrounding bank, fits that general type, though no excavation has confirmed it. Adding to the quiet interest of the location, a second similar feature lies approximately 90 metres to the north, suggesting the two may share a common origin or purpose.

The monument is not signposted and sits within working agricultural land, so access would require landowner permission. For those with a particular interest in unverified or ambiguous sites, it is visible as an irregular oval stony area on aerial imagery, including Digital Globe orthophotos from 2011 to 2013 and a Google Earth image from April 2015, which is perhaps the most practical way to get a sense of its form before considering a visit on the ground.

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Pete F
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