Burial mound, Carrickittle, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Burial Sites
In a low-lying marsh meadow in County Limerick, a circular earthen mound sits quietly among twelve monuments spread across three ordinary-looking fields.
What makes Carrickittle unusual is not any single feature but the cumulative strangeness of the complex as a whole: eight barrows and two platforms in one field, a ninth barrow tucked into the corner of the field to the north, and this tumulus, a possible burial mound of considerable age, occupying the nearest corner of the field to the east. That so many monuments should cluster together in what is essentially waterlogged lowland pasture is, in archaeological terms, a genuinely odd arrangement.
The most detailed account of the site comes from O'Kelly, writing in 1944, who recorded the tumulus as a circular earthen mound reaching a maximum height of roughly 1.8 metres on its southern side, with an overall diameter varying between approximately 18 and 20 metres. A fosse, which is simply a ditch dug around a monument, is visible on the eastern and southern sides only. O'Kelly suggested this is likely because the field rises away from the mound on those sides, making the cut more legible from those angles. The fosse itself is notably wide, wide enough that he concluded all the material used to build the mound was probably dug from it and piled inward, a common construction method for prehistoric earthworks. Whether the mound is a true burial monument or something else entirely remains uncertain; the record compiled by Caimin O'Brien in 2019 flags the possibility that it may even be a duplicate entry for nearby recorded features, which itself says something about how thoroughly this landscape has been studied and how much still resists easy classification.
The site sits within agricultural land, so access depends on the goodwill of landowners and an awareness that the ground underfoot is marshy. The complex is best approached in drier months when the meadow is less waterlogged, though even then the low-lying terrain can be soft. Visitors with an interest in the archaeology should look not just at the tumulus itself but at the broader spread of the complex across the three fields, since the relationship between the barrows, the platforms, and the mound is what gives the site its particular character. The fosse on the eastern and southern sides, where the surrounding field drops away and the ditch reads most clearly, is worth examining closely.