Cairn - burial cairn, Ballylooby, Co. Limerick

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Cairn – burial cairn, Ballylooby, Co. Limerick

The Ordnance Survey mapped it clearly enough in 1840, a small circular earthwork in the pasture south of the road that divides Limerick from Tipperary.

By 1897, the same surveyors could only annotate the spot with a bracketed note of absence: 'Carn (site of)'. Somewhere in the intervening decades, the stones of an ancient burial cairn, a mound of loosely stacked rocks raised over the dead, had been broken up and spread across the local roads. Nothing is visible on the ground today.

The hill immediately to the west, a low ridge rising to around 530 feet and known locally as Knockcarron, carries the Irish name Cnoc an Chairn, meaning Hill of the Cairn, and the local memory of what once stood on its southern slope ran long and specific. In 1938, Art Loftus, a pupil at Emly School, recorded what the older people of the area still knew as part of the Irish Folklore Commission's Schools' Collection. The cairn, he wrote, had stood halfway between two quarries on the south side of the hill, and it was the material from those same quarries that seems to have sealed its fate. The stones were taken, broken, and put on the roads. Local tradition connected the site to the Battle of Monmore in 1134, a clash between the O'Connors and the O'Briens in which the O'Brien army was driven eastward across the hill in the direction of Cashel, a lake to their right presumably cutting off any retreat. Whether the cairn was a prehistoric burial monument that simply absorbed the memory of the battle, or whether soldiers really were interred there afterwards, nobody was quite certain. Older residents could reportedly identify the graves by the different colour of the grass above them. When men quarrying on the northern side of the hill dug up heaps of bones, they reburied them nearby. More bones were disturbed south of the hill when workers tried to sink a pump near the creamery.

The site sits in pasture just south of the road forming the Moanmore townland boundary, roughly 80 metres east of Knockcarron itself, and there is nothing to see at the surface. The value of visiting lies mostly in the landscape reading: standing at the county boundary, looking up at that low ridge with its telling name, and considering what the 1840 map recorded and what the 1897 map mourned. The Dúchas Schools' Collection account, recorded by Art Loftus and available online at duchas.ie, gives the fullest picture of what was lost and what was known before the last people who remembered it were gone.

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