Barrow - bowl-barrow, Moanmore, Co. Tipperary

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Barrows

Barrow – bowl-barrow, Moanmore, Co. Tipperary

Sitting in gently undulating wet pasture in Moanmore, County Tipperary, there is a low circular mound that most people would walk past without a second thought.

It measures roughly ten metres across, ringed by a shallow earthen scarp and a broad external fosse, the fosse being the encircling ditch that typically defines a bowl-barrow of this type. The whole structure rises no more than about a metre above the surrounding ground, which is precisely why these monuments so often escape notice. They are not dramatic earthworks; they are quiet accumulations of intention, placed in the landscape by Bronze Age communities for whom the burial and commemoration of the dead involved careful, deliberate construction.

A bowl-barrow is among the most common prehistoric funerary monument types found across Ireland and Britain, consisting of a rounded mound set within a surrounding ditch. The example at Moanmore survives with reasonable integrity, though the fosse has been partially obscured. On the north-west to south-west arc it is no longer visible at ground level, and a modern field drain running roughly west-north-west to east-north-east has been cut along the line of the ditch on its northern side, which is the kind of incremental damage that accumulates quietly over generations of agricultural use. The interior of the mound slopes gently toward the east and remains clear of overgrowth, meaning the form of the monument is still legible to anyone who knows what they are looking at.

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Pete F
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