Barrow - bowl-barrow, Newtowndrangan, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Barrows
A mature lime tree crowns this ancient burial mound in a hay meadow outside Newtowndrangan, its roots slowly pulling apart the very fabric they grow from.
The tree is incidental, of course, a later arrival on something far older, but the combination gives the site an oddly layered quality: prehistoric engineering quietly being undone by centuries of vegetation and, at the southeastern edge, by the wear of livestock.
The mound is a bowl-barrow, a type of funerary monument common to the Bronze Age, in which a low, rounded earthen mound, often covering a burial, is shaped to resemble an inverted bowl when seen in profile. This particular example is oval rather than perfectly circular, measuring roughly 12.5 metres along its northeast-southwest axis and 9.8 metres across the northwest-southeast. Its sides rise to about 1.5 metres, steep on the northwestern and southeastern flanks and more gradual on the long axis ends. Despite the root damage at the southeastern face, the mound is considered well preserved. It sits on a northeast-facing slope in an ungrazed hay meadow, a setting that has probably helped protect it from the ploughing that has destroyed so many comparable monuments elsewhere. What makes the location quietly remarkable is how much company the mound keeps: a second bowl-barrow lies roughly 55 metres to the southwest, an earthwork around 130 metres further in the same direction, and a possible enclosure about 90 metres to the south-southwest. The entrance avenue to Temple View House is only 25 metres away, meaning that for however long that house has stood, its residents have been approaching their gate with a prehistoric burial landscape at their shoulder.