Barrow (Ring Barrow), Shronebeirne, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Barrows
On the north Kerry landscape sits a prehistoric burial monument whose identity may hinge on a single grey stone.
The site at Shronebeirne is a ring barrow, a type of funerary earthwork in which a low mound is encircled by a ditch, known as a fosse, and an outer bank. What makes this particular example quietly odd is a depression punched into the north-north-west section of that outer bank, roughly 3.5 metres across and 0.8 metres deep, and sitting within it, a large flat stone measuring approximately 1.6 metres by 0.6 metres.
That stone was recorded on the 1939 Ordnance Survey map under the Irish name Cloch Liath, meaning grey stone, and it is thought to be the origin of the barrow's placename. The mound itself is modest in scale, around 7.2 metres north to south and 7.4 metres east to west, with the surrounding fosse measuring 1.2 metres wide and the external bank extending to 3.2 metres. The bank rises only around 0.6 metres above the surrounding ground, and just 0.3 metres above the base of the fosse, so this is not a monument that dominates the horizon. These measurements come from C. Toal's North Kerry Archaeological Survey, published in 1995, which catalogued and described the site in detail. Ring barrows in Ireland generally date to the Bronze Age or early Iron Age, and while the Shronebeirne example has not been excavated, its form is consistent with that broader tradition of enclosed burial or ceremonial mounds.
The grey stone itself raises an unresolved question. Whether it was always embedded in that depression, perhaps placed there as a marker when the monument was in use, or whether it arrived later through collapse, robbing, or some other disturbance, is not known. That the landscape still carries a name derived from it, preserved in a mid-twentieth-century map, suggests it was a landmark in its own right long before anyone thought to measure it.