Barrow (Ring Barrow), Tullig, Co. Clare

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Barrow (Ring Barrow), Tullig, Co. Clare

On a south-facing coastal ridge in County Clare, three ancient burial monuments were once arranged in a loose cluster across a boggy, grazed hillside.

Only two of them survive. The third was obliterated by quarrying associated with a nearby promontory fort, leaving the remaining pair as quiet witnesses to how quickly even the most durable prehistoric constructions can be erased.

A ring-barrow is a type of funerary monument common across prehistoric Ireland and Britain, consisting of a low central mound enclosed by a circular ditch, known as a fosse, and an outer earthen bank. The example at Tullig is roughly oval in plan, measuring about 17.6 metres north to south and 21.2 metres east to west, with a central flat mound approximately 12.5 by 14 metres across. Around that mound runs a fosse about a metre wide, and beyond that an outer bank roughly three metres wide. The whole arrangement is poorly preserved: the western side of the outer bank has been worn down to little more than a low scarp half a metre high, and trackways have damaged the northern and south-western sections further. One feature that remains legible is a formal entrance gap, about 2.4 metres wide, on the western side of the monument. A companion ring-barrow sits 75 metres to the north-west on the same ridge, and the two together give some sense of how the landscape here was once organised around the dead, with long views eastward and northward across what would have been a meaningful territorial horizon. The site is protected under a preservation order made under the National Monuments Acts 1930 to 2014.

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