Hearth, Rathmore South, Co. Limerick

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Settlement Sites

Hearth, Rathmore South, Co. Limerick

There is a place in County Limerick where a fire once burned, and then was simply forgotten.

No trace of it appears on the Ordnance Survey's historic maps, no outline marks it from the air, and a Google Earth image taken in the summer of 2018 reveals nothing but ordinary pasture. The only reason we know it existed at all is that a gas pipeline came through, and someone paid attention before the machinery moved in.

In 1986, archaeologist Margaret Gowen carried out a full excavation at this spot in the townland of Rathmore South, working ahead of the Bórd Gáis Éireann Curraghleigh to West Limerick pipeline. What she recorded and later published in 1988 was a hearth, catalogued as Site 2/33/1. A hearth in the archaeological sense is not a fireplace in the domestic, chimney-breast meaning, but rather a surviving deposit of burnt material, sometimes clay or stone, that marks a place where fire was regularly maintained, whether for cooking, warmth, or craft work. This particular one sat in pastureland roughly 35 metres northwest of the Camoge River, which at this point also serves as the boundary between Rathmore South and the neighbouring townland of Meanus. An enclosure of some kind lies about 225 metres to the southeast, though what relationship, if any, it had to the hearth is not recorded in the available notes.

For the visitor, there is almost nothing to see. The site sits in a working field, the archaeology was fully excavated and the ground long since returned to grass, and no marker indicates where Gowen's team worked. The Camoge River nearby is worth knowing as a navigational reference, running as it does along the townland edge, but the hearth itself has effectively been absorbed back into the landscape. What makes this place worth a moment's thought is precisely that quality of invisibility. It represents a category of Irish archaeological find that is surprisingly common: sites recorded only because infrastructure projects require advance survey, existing in the published record but nowhere else, known to specialists and essentially unknown to everyone else.

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Pete F
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