Barrow - mound barrow, Oyster Island, Co. Sligo

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Barrows

Barrow – mound barrow, Oyster Island, Co. Sligo

On a low ridge running east to west across Oyster Island, a small mound sits in open pasture between Coney Island and Rosses Point on the Sligo coast.

It does not announce itself. Roughly a metre and a half high, with a flat top and gently sloping sides, it reads at first glance as a natural rise in the ground, an accident of the landscape rather than anything made by human hands. But its proportions are deliberate, and its presence on this particular island, in this particular alignment, is not.

A mound barrow is a prehistoric burial monument, typically a raised earthwork of soil and stone constructed over one or more interments, sometimes accompanied by a surrounding ditch known as a fosse. No fosse survives here at ground level. The mound itself, which measures roughly twelve metres across at its base and six metres across its flat summit, was originally circular in plan. It is no longer. The northwest to southwest edge has been cut away at some point, leaving a steep, crescent-shaped scar, and erosion along the southeast to southwest arc has carved a low terrace into the mound's side, running about a metre wide around the midpoint. What remains is roughly D-shaped, best preserved along the northwest to southeast axis, where the original gentle slope still reads clearly in the ground. Earth and stone make up its fabric, and aside from the damage it has absorbed, the core of the structure is essentially intact.

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Pete F
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