Pit, Carrow, Co. Limerick

Co. Limerick |

Settlement Sites

Pit, Carrow, Co. Limerick

A small pit in a Limerick pasture field might seem an unlikely candidate for any kind of record, yet this particular one in the townland of Carrow exists almost nowhere except in the notes of the archaeologist who dug it out.

It never appeared on Ordnance Survey Ireland's historic mapping, it left no surface trace visible from the air, and once excavated it vanished entirely from the landscape. What it left behind was a description: a roughly subcircular cut, 1.5 metres north to south and 1 metre east to west, pressed shallowly into the orange and yellow boulder clay beneath the field, its fill dark with burnt stones and charcoal.

The pit came to light in 2002, not through any planned survey but because a pipeline was going through. Topsoil-stripping for the Bord Gáis Éireann Pipeline to the West exposed the feature, which was then excavated by Brian Halpin under Licence No. 02E1082. The material inside, those burnt stones and fragments of charcoal, matched the signature of a fulacht fiadh, a type of prehistoric cooking or processing site found widely across Ireland, typically identified by a characteristic mound of fire-cracked stone beside a trough or pit that would have been filled with water and heated using stones from a fire. Whether this pit functioned alone as an isolated roasting pit, or was once part of a larger fulacht fiadh that has since been destroyed by centuries of ploughing, is a question the excavation could not fully resolve. Halpin leaned toward the latter explanation, noting in his 2004 report that a ploughed-out fulacht fiadh was the more probable interpretation. The site sits about 185 metres east of the townland boundary with Ballygrennan.

There is, practically speaking, nothing to see here now. Aerial imagery from multiple sources, including surveys carried out between 2005 and 2013 and a Google Earth image from June 2018, shows no visible trace of the monument. The field has returned to ordinary pasture. The value of knowing this site exists lies not in visiting it but in what it represents about how much of the Irish archaeological record surfaces only by accident, briefly, during construction work, before disappearing again beneath the grass.

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