Barrow (Ring Barrow), Kyle, Co. Tipperary

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Barrow (Ring Barrow), Kyle, Co. Tipperary

Sixty metres across and yet barely perceptible to the untrained eye, a large prehistoric ring-barrow sits in flat, poorly drained grassland near Kyle in County Tipperary, its concentric earthworks so low that a casual walker might cross them without registering what they are.

A ring-barrow is a burial monument of the Bronze Age, typically consisting of a central mound surrounded by one or more ditches and banks, the whole arrangement functioning as a kind of formal boundary between the world of the living and whatever was interred at its centre. This example is unusually well preserved, and its scale rewards close attention once you know what to look for.

The monument's internal arrangement is quietly complex. At its heart sits a low circular mound, roughly 23 metres in diameter and only about 10 centimetres high, enclosed by a shallow inner fosse, which is simply a ditch, and then an earthen bank. Beyond that lies a waterlogged outer fosse, still holding water today, and the degraded remains of a second outer bank, now largely reduced to a scarp. The overall diameter of the whole monument from north to south measures 60 metres, making it a substantial construction despite its subtlety at ground level. It does not stand alone in this landscape: a bowl-barrow, a related but simpler type of burial mound, lies about 128 metres to the north-east in an adjacent field, and a fulacht fiadh, a type of Bronze Age cooking site associated with outdoor feasting or food preparation, lies to the south. The eastern side of the inner bank and its accompanying outer fosse suffered damage when drainage ditches were cut through the monument in the nineteenth century, a reminder of how casually such earthworks could be disrupted by agricultural improvement schemes that had no interest in what lay beneath the soil.

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