Barrow - mound barrow, Carrowcaslan, Co. Sligo
Co. Sligo |
Barrows
In the lowlands of Carrowcaslan, in County Sligo, a modest earthen mound sits in pasture at the southern edge of wet, marshy ground, looking for all the world like an unremarkable rise in a field.
It measures roughly ten and a half metres north to south and just over nine metres east to west, standing no higher than a metre and fifteen centimetres at its tallest point. What makes it quietly anomalous is the flatness of its top, a level platform roughly six and a half by five metres, and the complete absence of any encircling bank or fosse, the ditch that typically rings prehistoric burial mounds of this kind.
This is a mound barrow, a type of prehistoric funerary monument built to cover a burial, sometimes a single interment and sometimes several accumulated over generations. The hollow in which it sits, bordered by marshy ground, suggests a deliberate siting, perhaps chosen for its proximity to water or its slightly enclosed, sheltered quality. Low-lying locations like this are less common for such monuments than elevated ground, which adds an element of curiosity to the choice. Without excavation it is impossible to say when the mound was raised or by whom, though barrows of this general form appear across Ireland from the Neolithic through the Bronze Age, a span of several thousand years ending roughly three millennia ago.