Barrow, Ballinard, Co. Limerick

Co. Limerick |

Barrows

Barrow, Ballinard, Co. Limerick

Three ancient burial mounds sitting in a waterlogged field near the village of Herbertstown are easy to miss on the ground, yet from the air they are remarkably clear, lined up one after another on a north-south axis like a string of beads pressed into the Limerick pasture.

What makes them particularly unusual is that they went completely unrecorded on Ordnance Survey historic maps, meaning they slipped through the documentary record entirely until aerial photography caught them out.

The site was first identified in 1986 during the Bruff aerial photographic survey, when a cropmark revealed three conjoined barrows, burial mounds of a type built across Ireland during the Bronze Age, typically covering the remains of the dead beneath a raised earthen or stone platform. The poorness of the surrounding ground, rushy and poorly drained, has actually helped preserve the monument's outline. Subsequent satellite imagery taken between 2005 and 2020 confirmed two of the barrows clearly and suggested a possible third to the south. The northern mound measures roughly 25 metres in diameter and is defined by a fosse, the encircling ditch that was dug when the mound was raised, here about 8 metres wide. The central mound is larger, at around 30 metres across, with a fosse of 11 metres. The southernmost is the largest of the three at approximately 37 metres in diameter, though its fosse is only partially visible, running from the south-west around to the north-east. An enclosure of unknown date sits 75 metres to the south-east, and the Camoge River runs through the valley roughly 765 metres to the west. The record was compiled by Alison McQueen and Vera Rahilly and uploaded in November 2020.

The barrows sit on private farmland about 200 metres north-east of Herbertstown, in the kind of rush-covered field that discourages casual exploration. The rushes that obscure the ground-level view are, somewhat ironically, what make the fosses so legible from above; the damp hollows of the ditches encourage denser growth, effectively tracing the mounds' outlines in darker green. Anyone with an interest in aerial archaeology would do well to pull up the Google Earth imagery of the area before visiting, since the site reads far more clearly as a pattern of circles from altitude than it ever would from the field boundary. There is no formal public access, and the monument is not signposted.

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