Burial mound, Garrynlease, Co. Limerick

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Burial Sites

Burial mound, Garrynlease, Co. Limerick

A low, oval swell of earth sitting in a pasture field near the townland boundary of Garrynlease and Kilfinnane is one of those monuments that the nineteenth-century mapmakers simply passed over.

It does not appear on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1840, nor on the twenty-five-inch edition of 1897, which is itself a curious absence. Burial mounds of this kind, sometimes called barrows, are among the oldest human-made features in the Irish landscape, typically raised over the remains of the dead during the Bronze Age or earlier, and they tend to leave a mark somewhere in the cartographic record. This one slipped through entirely, only surfacing on a later Cassini edition of the OSi six-inch map, which records it as a small sub-circular mound measuring roughly twelve metres on its northwest-to-southeast axis and about six metres across the other way.

What makes the omission stranger still is that the mound is not isolated. A possible standing stone lies approximately 170 metres to the west, and a barrow sits just 75 metres to the southwest, suggesting this corner of County Limerick was once a place of some ritual or funerary significance, with monuments clustered in the kind of loose grouping that prehistorians often associate with a shared landscape of memory or ceremony. The site was compiled for the record by Fiona Rooney and uploaded in August 2021, drawing partly on aerial imagery. Digital Globe orthoimages taken between 2011 and 2013, and a Google Earth image dated 19 March 2015, both show the monument clearly as a circular earthwork, identifiable even from above amid an area marked by extensive quarrying activity in the surrounding ground.

The mound sits in pasture, and like most earthworks in active farmland it is subject to the rhythms of grazing and seasonal ground cover, so visibility at ground level will vary considerably depending on the time of year. Longer grass in summer can obscure the subtle rise of a monument this modest in scale. Visitors approaching from the Kilfinnane side should note that the mound lies 61 metres east of the townland boundary. The wider cluster of features in the area, including the nearby possible standing stone and the barrow to the southwest, rewards a slow, attentive walk rather than a glance from the road, since none of these monuments announces itself loudly in the landscape.

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