Mound, Tawnatruffaun, Co. Sligo

Co. Sligo |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Mound, Tawnatruffaun, Co. Sligo

At the mouth of the Fiddangarode valley in County Sligo, a large earthen mound sits on a gentle north-westward slope, its original round-topped profile still largely intact despite the centuries.

Measuring roughly 21 metres north to south and just over 15 metres east to west, with a maximum height of about 2.25 metres, it is a substantial presence in the landscape, the kind of thing that registers as quietly wrong in scale when you come across it in an otherwise unremarkable field.

What makes the site particularly interesting is not the mound alone but what runs along its base. From the south-east, curving around through the south and continuing to the north-west, lies a long, low field clearance cairn, a linear ridge of stones gathered and deposited over time as surrounding land was worked and cleared. Field clearance cairns are among the more overlooked features of the Irish countryside, accumulations of stone pulled from fields by farmers across generations rather than any single deliberate construction. Here, the cairn wraps around the base of the mound in a way that suggests the two features have coexisted and perhaps interacted for a very long time, the older monument quietly shaping how people organised the ground around it.

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Pete F
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