Mound, Kilmacogue, Co. Limerick

Co. Limerick |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Mound, Kilmacogue, Co. Limerick

A field of flat pasture beside the N24 in County Limerick holds an archaeological monument that is, by now, essentially invisible.

No mound breaks the surface, no ring of stones catches the eye, and nothing in the surrounding landscape signals that anything of note was ever here. Yet aerial photography tells a different story, revealing the ghostly outline of a circular earthwork that once measured roughly 21 metres in external diameter, its ditched enclosure still legible from above even as it vanished underfoot.

The site, situated about 25 metres north of the N24, was not recorded on Ordnance Survey Ireland's historic maps at all, which in itself is telling. It was identified as a monument only through the Bruff aerial photographic survey, catalogued as Bruff 19 (AP 4/3622), which captured the disturbed ground pattern that marks its footprint. Orthoimages taken between 2005 and 2012 by OSi, and again by Digital Globe between 2011 and 2013, confirmed the mound's presence as a distinct feature. A ring-barrow, which is a type of prehistoric burial monument typically consisting of a low central mound enclosed by a ditch and outer bank, lies approximately 80 metres to the north-west of the site and is recorded separately (LI024-208). By the time a Google Earth image was captured in November 2018, the mound had been levelled and no longer survives as any kind of obvious above-ground feature. A further earthwork is recorded about 200 metres to the west (LI024-085). The record was compiled by Edmond O'Donovan and uploaded in September 2020.

There is little to see on the ground today, and that is precisely what makes this site worth knowing about. The flat pasture gives no hint of what satellite and aerial imaging eventually revealed, and the levelling of the mound means that the record now exists primarily in photographs and survey data rather than in any physical form. Visitors with an interest in the archaeology of the Bruff area might note the proximity to the N24 and look north-west towards the area where the potential ring-barrow sits; it remains faintly detectable on aerial imagery, though even that trace is subtle. The wider landscape here has clearly yielded more than its surface suggests.

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Pete F
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