Mound, Corbally (Shanid By.), Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Ritual/Ceremonial
What is notable about this site in Corbally, in the barony of Shanid in County Limerick, is precisely that there is almost nothing left to see.
An oval earthen mound, measuring roughly six metres north to south and ten metres east to west, was recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1923. By the time the site was assessed in more recent decades, the mound had been levelled entirely, and the ground quarried away. What remains is a roughly horseshoe-shaped hollow running from the south-east to the north-west at the base of a low hillock, set within ordinary farmland pasture on a south-facing slope.
Mounds of this kind across Ireland range in origin from prehistoric burial cairns to early medieval ringfort remnants, and their precise function is rarely legible from surface evidence alone. In this case, the 1923 OS map provides the only formal record of what the feature looked like before it was disturbed. Denis Power, who compiled the site record uploaded in August 2011, noted the quarrying activity as the likely cause of the mound's disappearance, suggesting the material was removed for practical agricultural or construction purposes rather than through any deliberate archaeological intervention. The barony of Shanid takes its name from Shanid Castle nearby, a stronghold associated with the Fitzgerald earls of Desmond, and this corner of Limerick has a layered history of early settlement, though nothing in the available record connects this particular mound to any specific period or use.
The site sits in working pasture, and there is no formal access or visitor infrastructure of any kind. The quarry hollow at the base of the hillock is the only feature likely to catch the eye of someone who knows to look for it, and even that requires some patience with the terrain. Anyone with an interest in how the Irish landscape was recorded and then altered over the course of the twentieth century may find a certain melancholy interest in comparing the 1923 map sheet with what the ground actually shows today, the mound itself long since gone, leaving only a curved depression and a grid reference to mark where it stood.