Barrow, Lugbaun, Co. Sligo

Co. Sligo |

Barrows

Barrow, Lugbaun, Co. Sligo

A low, unassuming ring in the Sligo countryside, this barrow at Lugbaun sits at the southern end of a gentle rise in undulating pasture, easy to overlook and easier still to misread.

A barrow is a burial mound, typically prehistoric, though the term covers a range of earthwork forms. What survives here is a slightly raised circular area just under ten metres across, enclosed by a bank of earth and stone that varies from roughly two to three and a half metres wide and rises internally between half a metre and just under a metre. Modest figures, but enough to suggest something deliberate, something that once mattered to the people who shaped this ground.

A few details quietly complicate the picture. The enclosing bank incorporates field clearance stones, meaning material gathered from the surrounding land over time has been folded into the structure, blurring the boundary between original construction and later agricultural activity. Some revetment stones, stones used to face or stabilise the bank, are still visible. There is no fosse, the defining ditch that typically accompanies an earthwork enclosure, which distinguishes this site from a ringfort and nudges it back towards its funerary classification. A narrow break in the bank at the north-west, just forty centimetres wide and considerably eroded, may represent the original entrance. Inside, along the southern and south-western edge, a low stony scarp borders a hollow that was likely created by quarrying, though whether that happened in prehistory or centuries later is not recorded.

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Pete F
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