Barrow (Ring Barrow), Lackakera, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Barrows
On the high ground of Lackakera in County Tipperary, there is a circular earthwork that has survived the centuries largely intact, quietly occupying a commanding position in a mountainous landscape with views stretching in every direction.
What makes it quietly unusual is not just its preservation but its proportions: a ring-barrow, a type of prehistoric funerary monument typically associated with the Bronze Age, measuring roughly 17.5 metres north to south and 16 metres east to west. Ring-barrows consist of a raised central platform, the area where burial or ritual activity would originally have taken place, surrounded by a fosse, essentially a ditch dug from the earth, and then an outer bank beyond that. At Lackakera, the fosse is around three metres wide and the external bank stands between half a metre and a full metre in height internally, giving the whole structure a layered, concentric quality that is still clearly legible from ground level.
The monument is not entirely untouched. At the centre of the platform sits a small mound of field-clearance debris, the kind of casual accumulation that happens when farmers over generations simply needed somewhere to deposit stones gathered from the surrounding land. It is a telling detail: the site was not deliberately demolished or robbed out, but rather used as a convenient dump, which in its own way speaks to how thoroughly the original significance of the structure had faded from local memory. The fosse, noted as waterlogged from the eastern to the southern arc at the time of survey, adds a slightly eerie quality to the setting, a partial moat forming naturally in the hollow around a structure that was already ancient when medieval Ireland was young.

