Barrow (Ring Barrow), Carrownaglogh, Co. Mayo

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Barrow (Ring Barrow), Carrownaglogh, Co. Mayo

In a pasture field in County Mayo, just fifty metres from the Glenree or Owenmore River, a low circular earthwork sits quietly in gently undulating farmland.

It has been there long enough that hawthorn and brambles have taken root along its outer edge, and at some point in the more recent past a field fence was built within a metre of its western side. Neither the vegetation nor the boundary wire quite obscures what the structure is: a ring barrow, a prehistoric burial monument consisting of a raised central platform encircled by a ditch and an outer bank. The form was widely used across Ireland and Britain from the Bronze Age onwards, and the basic logic of it, a mound or platform set apart from the surrounding ground by an encircling fosse, is legible here even after millennia.

The monument at Carrownaglogh is modest in scale but precise in its proportions. The central platform measures 8.4 metres in diameter, and the fosse, or encircling ditch, ranges from 2.2 metres wide on the north-north-west side to 2.6 metres on the south-south-east. Beyond that lies the external bank, about 3 metres wide and constructed of earth and stone, with its interior height reaching 0.85 metres on the north-north-west side and dropping to 0.4 metres on the south-south-east. The overall diameter of the whole structure, from outer edge to outer edge, comes to 16.4 metres. The bank is not purely prehistoric in its present composition; it incorporates field clearance stones, the kind of material generations of farmers have gathered and dumped at the edges of workable ground. That layering of prehistoric intent and later agricultural practicality is common at sites like this, where a monument too awkward to plough around becomes a convenient place to deposit whatever is in the way. Across the river, roughly 115 metres to the south-east, there is a possible second embanked barrow, which, if confirmed, would suggest this stretch of the Owenmore valley held some significance in the prehistoric landscape.

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