Platform, Knockfennell, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Ritual/Ceremonial
Somewhere in wet Limerick pasture, at the junction of two drainage channels, there is a low rectangular earthwork that has essentially vanished from view.
Three ring-barrows, which are circular or oval burial mounds enclosed by a shallow ditch, sit cut into its surface, and the whole complex measures roughly 22.8 metres north to south by 13.7 metres east to west. Despite that physical presence on the ground, the monument never appeared on the Ordnance Survey's historic maps, and aerial imagery captured as recently as 2018 shows nothing at all. What you have, in other words, is an ancient site that archaeology has recorded, described in some detail, and then essentially watched disappear.
The site sits around 160 metres south-west of the townland boundary with Ballingoola, just beyond the edge of what the records describe as an extensive marsh. O'Kelly, writing in 1944, was the first to describe it in any detail, noting a very low rectangular platform surrounded by a very shallow fosse, the entrance no longer recognisable. At the southern end, two barrows lie side by side, one oval measuring 13.7 metres by 7 metres and one circular at 7.3 metres in diameter, their enclosing ditches merging into that of the outer platform. A third circular barrow of the same diameter sits to the south of the oval one, its fosse also conjoined with its neighbour. Ó Ríordáin and MacDermott returned to the site in 1949 and confirmed O'Kelly's reading, marking the platform on their location map as point Y. The record was compiled formally by Alison McQueen and Vera Rahilly and uploaded in August 2020.
The honest word of warning here is that this is not a site where a visitor arrives and sees something clearly. The earthworks were already described as very low and shallow in 1944, and modern aerial photography has failed to pick them up at all, which suggests that ground drainage, agricultural activity, or simple time have reduced them close to invisibility. The location, in wet low-lying pasture in the angle of two land drains, is marshy ground and likely difficult underfoot, particularly outside the dry summer months. Anyone with a serious interest in finding the remains would be better served by consulting the original Ó Ríordáin and MacDermott location map and cross-referencing it against current mapping, then approaching on foot with low expectations of a dramatic landscape and a greater curiosity about what has gone.