Megalithic tomb, Ballyadam, Co. Limerick

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Megalithic Tombs

Megalithic tomb, Ballyadam, Co. Limerick

A prehistoric tomb sat in the corner of a Limerick pasture field for an unknown length of time before anyone in the archaeological record thought to write it down.

It does not appear on any Ordnance Survey historic maps, and even repeated aerial and satellite surveys between 2005 and 2018 failed to pick it up from the air. What eventually brought it to attention was someone actually walking the ground.

In 2005, Emmet Byrnes, an archaeologist working for the Forest Service, identified the monument at the base of a north-facing hill slope in Ballyadam, just inside the townland boundary with Moigh. He recorded a small stone chamber measuring 1.9 metres in length and 1.4 metres in width, formed by a large thin upright slab on the western side, a low subrectangular stone at the rear, and a substantial oval capstone resting across them. The eastern side stone is missing from view, and may have been absorbed into the field boundary wall at some point. A separate standing stone, known as an orthostat, sits roughly 0.45 metres to the south-west of the main chamber. The tomb is aligned north to south, and its internal height tapers noticeably, from 0.75 metres at the southern end down to just 0.15 metres at the north. Some smaller stones pressed into the soil along the western side might represent what remains of an original cairn, the mound of loose stone that would once have covered many such monuments, though a farm track running alongside makes that interpretation uncertain. The structure shares certain features with a wedge tomb, a monument type typically dating to the late Neolithic or early Bronze Age and generally characterised by a tapering, roofed gallery, though it does not conform neatly to that category.

The monument sits in the south-east corner of a pasture field, beside a farm trackway, which makes it easy to overlook and also complicates reading what survives. The chamber is low to the ground, and the missing eastern stone means the arrangement of uprights is incomplete on that side. Satellite imagery is evidently no help in locating it; the record notes it remained invisible across multiple orthoimages taken over more than a decade. Anyone trying to find it should expect a modest, ground-level structure rather than an imposing presence, and should look carefully at the stones near the field boundary, where one of the tomb's original elements may now be hidden in plain sight.

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