Burial mound, Killahurler, Co. Wicklow

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Burial Sites

Burial mound, Killahurler, Co. Wicklow

On a gentle north-facing slope in Killahurler, Co. Wicklow, a prehistoric burial mound survives in partial form, its steep sides and encircling ditch still legible in the landscape despite the damage done to it over the centuries.

The mound is circular, roughly sixteen metres across and between two and a half and four metres high, and it is defined by a fosse, the term for a surrounding ditch, that runs two to four metres wide at an average depth of around forty centimetres. The eastern side and part of the centre have been lost to quarrying at some point, leaving what amounts to an interrupted monument, present enough to read but incomplete enough to remind you of how casually these things were once treated.

The single most suggestive detail attached to this site is brief and unverifiable: an urn was allegedly found here during the nineteenth century, a discovery noted by the archaeologist John Waddell in his 1990 work on Irish Bronze Age burial practices. Urns of this kind were typically used to contain cremated remains, placed within mounds as part of funerary rites that were widespread across Ireland during the Bronze Age. Whether the Killahurler urn was ever properly recorded, or where it ended up, is not known. The word "allegedly" carries some weight here. It suggests the discovery passed into local knowledge rather than into any formal record, which was not unusual for the period. The mound itself was included on the Register of Historic Monuments on 7 September 2009, when the then Minister John Gormley added it formally to the protected list, a recognition that arrived rather late given how much of the site had already gone.

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