Barrow - embanked barrow, Seskin, Co. Tipperary

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Barrows

Barrow – embanked barrow, Seskin, Co. Tipperary

In a wet, levelled pasture field in Seskin, County Tipperary, a small cluster of blackthorn trees marks something older and stranger than its surroundings suggest.

Beneath and around those trees lies an embanked barrow, a prehistoric burial monument defined by a low earthen bank and an outer fosse, or ditch, that together trace out a roughly oval enclosure on the ground. It is not dramatic to look at. But that is rather the point: what survives here is the compressed memory of a structure that was never meant to be subtle.

The monument is sub-circular in plan, measuring approximately 14 metres northeast to southwest and 11 metres northwest to southeast. The encircling bank, where it is best preserved at the southwest and northwest, still stands to an external height of around 0.45 metres, with an overall width of 2.3 metres, narrowing to just 0.6 metres at the top. Elsewhere, particularly around the northeast sector, the bank has been reduced to a simple scarp, and the fosse itself, which runs between roughly 2.35 and 2.45 metres wide and survives to a depth of only 0.05 to 0.15 metres, has been straightened, suggesting some degree of agricultural interference over the years. The interior of the enclosure is generally level. Across the field to the southwest and southeast, numerous undulations hint at further subsurface features, though what precisely lies beneath the improved pasture is unknown. An embanked barrow of this type would originally have served as a burial mound, the bank and fosse combination forming a defined sacred or funerary boundary around a central interment, most likely dating to the Bronze Age or earlier.

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Pete F
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