Barrow, Ballyfauskeen, Co. Limerick

Co. Limerick |

Barrows

Barrow, Ballyfauskeen, Co. Limerick

There is a field in County Limerick where, in all likelihood, the dead were buried long ago, and yet nothing on the ground betrays the fact.

No mound, no ring of stones, no visible disturbance in the pasture. The only reason anyone suspects something lies here at all is a single aerial photograph taken on a November morning in 1984, during survey work for a gas pipeline.

The site sits in reclaimed pasture in the townland of Ballyfauskeen, roughly 160 metres east of the stream that marks the boundary with the neighbouring townland of Curraghturk. That 1984 photograph, taken as part of the Bórd Gáis Éireann Curraleigh West-Limerick gas pipeline survey, captured what specialists interpreted as a possible ring-barrow, a type of prehistoric funerary monument typically consisting of a low central mound enclosed by a circular ditch and sometimes an outer bank. A second possible barrow has been noted approximately 20 metres to the north-west, suggesting the two features may have formed part of a small funerary grouping, a pattern not uncommon in the Irish landscape where such monuments tend to cluster. Crucially, neither feature appears on any historic Ordnance Survey Ireland maps, meaning they escaped the notice of nineteenth-century surveyors entirely. By the time satellite and orthoimage surveys were carried out between 2011 and 2013, no surface trace was visible at all. The record was compiled by Martin Fitzpatrick and uploaded to the national monument database in October 2021.

For anyone inclined to visit, expectations should be managed carefully. The landscape here is ordinary working farmland, and there is nothing to see with the naked eye. The value of the site lies entirely in what it represents conceptually: a monument known only through a single aerial photograph, whose precise nature remains unconfirmed, sitting in a field that gives no hint of its possible antiquity. Access would require landowner permission, and the site itself offers no visitor infrastructure of any kind. What makes it worth knowing about is precisely that absence, the way a routine pipeline survey, decades ago, briefly illuminated something that the land has since quietly swallowed again.

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Pete F
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