Road - road/trackway, Ballybronoge, Co. Limerick

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Roads & Tracks

Road – road/trackway, Ballybronoge, Co. Limerick

A medieval road running through a children's burial ground is not something that announces itself easily, but that is precisely what survives, at least in fragmentary form, at Ballybronoge in County Limerick.

The trackway passes through the Killasragh Children's Burial Ground, a site of the kind known in Ireland as a cillín, a place where unbaptised infants and others excluded from consecrated ground were quietly interred, often over many centuries. The coincidence of a working road and such a burial place raises questions that the archaeological record can only partially answer.

The site came to attention in 1990, when O'Rahilly identified the trackway during the archaeological environmental impact assessment carried out for the proposed Adare to Annacotty road, the N20. The following year, Ken Hanley undertook test excavations to the northwest of the burial ground. Two trenches were opened, one roughly nine metres by eight metres and a smaller three-metre square, positioned to investigate the course of the apparent trackway as it moved through the burial complex. Three pottery sherds recovered from the dig pointed to a date in the thirteenth or fourteenth century, placing the road firmly in the later medieval period. Notably, the excavation also turned up evidence of activity that pre-dated the trackway itself, suggesting the ground had seen use before the road was ever laid down, though the nature of that earlier activity was not fully resolved.

Ballybronoge lies in the general corridor between Adare and Annacotty, and the site sits within a wider archaeological landscape shaped by the N20 road development that prompted the original survey. The burial ground is a recorded monument, reference LI021-025002, which gives it some protection and means it appears on the Sites and Monuments Record maintained by the National Monuments Service. Access to the immediate area may be limited given the proximity to road infrastructure, and there is little above ground to mark the trackway's course. What rewards attention here is the layering: a road threading through a burial place, itself laid over something older still, all of it compressed into a modest corner of east County Limerick.

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