Mound, Magheraghanrush, Co. Sligo
Co. Sligo |
Ritual/Ceremonial
Two mounds sit within roughly a hundred metres of each other in the elevated rocky pasture of Magheraghanrush, and the smaller of the pair is easy to overlook.
It rises no more than about forty-five centimetres above the surrounding ground, a flat-topped disc of earth and stone with a base diameter of ten metres tapering to five at the summit. There is no fosse, the encircling ditch that typically accompanies earthworks of this kind, visible at ground level, which makes it harder to read at a glance and easier to dismiss as a natural undulation in the field.
The mound sits in the north-east corner of a large field on a very slight south-south-west-facing slope, the kind of modest, unshowy positioning that is fairly common among low earthwork monuments across the west of Ireland. What the mound actually was, whether a burial monument, a marker of some territorial or ritual significance, or something else entirely, is not recorded. What is recorded is that its summit is not smooth. The surface undulates irregularly, and a depression oriented roughly north-west to south-east cuts across the north-west quadrant of the top, measuring about 1.4 metres long, 0.8 metres wide, and 0.15 metres deep. This small hollow is considered likely to reflect modern disturbance rather than any original feature of the monument, a reminder that even very inconspicuous earthworks attract interference over time.