Barrow, Ballinlig, Co. Sligo

Co. Sligo |

Barrows

Barrow, Ballinlig, Co. Sligo

On a small peninsula pushing into Ballisodare Bay in County Sligo, there is a mound that has never appeared on any edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps.

Not an omission corrected in later revisions, not a feature deemed too minor for the cartographers and then quietly added; simply absent across every edition ever produced. That alone gives the site an odd quality, a presence that official record-keeping somehow passed over entirely.

What survives is modest but legible. The mound is oval in plan, measuring roughly 5.2 metres north to south and 3.4 metres east to west, with a low, flat top defined by a gentle scarp, a slight step in the ground surface, running to about 0.3 metres in height. There is no fosse, meaning no surrounding ditch of the kind commonly dug when constructing a mound to provide both material and a defensive boundary. A barrow, in this context, is a prehistoric burial mound, typically raised over the remains of the dead and sometimes accompanied by grave goods, though no excavation record is available here to say what, if anything, lies beneath. The site sits on a low rise on the peninsula, which places it in a position with a degree of elevation over the bay, a siting pattern common to prehistoric funerary monuments. It was identified by M.A. Timoney in 1989, through personal communication rather than published survey, which accounts in part for why it remained outside formal cartographic knowledge for so long.

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Pete F
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