Barrow (Ditch barrow), Lattin, Co. Tipperary

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Barrow (Ditch barrow), Lattin, Co. Tipperary

In a field of improved pasture near Lattin in County Tipperary, a prehistoric burial monument survives as little more than a faint circular scar in the ground.

The site is a ditch barrow, a form of funerary enclosure in which a shallow ditch, or fosse, defines a roughly circular area rather than a raised earthen mound. Here, that defining ditch is only about ten centimetres deep and 1.25 metres wide, tracing an arc from west through north to south-east around a circular interior roughly four metres across. The ground inside sits at virtually the same level as the surrounding field, so there is no dramatic mound to catch the eye. What persists, despite decades of agricultural improvement, is a patch of wet, rushy ground that the drainage of the surrounding pasture has never quite been able to tame.

The monument was identified not by anyone walking the field but by scrutiny of aerial photographs, which can reveal cropmarks and soilmarks invisible at ground level. Shallow land drains run close by on the western and south-eastern sides, a reminder of how actively the surrounding land has been managed. A second ditch barrow sits approximately seven metres to the north-north-east, suggesting this corner of Tipperary once held a small cluster of prehistoric funerary features rather than a single isolated monument. Such groupings were not unusual; the living sometimes returned to the same ground across generations, adding new structures near older ones in ways that are now difficult to interpret in detail.

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Pete F
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