Barrow - bowl-barrow, Ballymaurice, Co. Longford

Co. Longford |

Barrows

Barrow – bowl-barrow, Ballymaurice, Co. Longford

In a pasture field on a north-east-facing slope in County Longford, a prehistoric burial mound rises to an unusually sharp point, giving it a profile quite different from the broad, rounded silhouette most people associate with ancient earthworks.

The mound measures roughly 19.5 metres across at its base and stands about three metres high, tapering upward in a way that makes it look almost constructed rather than natural, though both earth and stone were used in its composition.

This is a bowl-barrow, a type of funerary monument typically dating to the Bronze Age, in which the central mound is surrounded by a ditch and sometimes an outer bank. The encircling features here are still partially legible on the ground: a levelled bank of earth and stone, and just inside it a wide, steep-sided fosse, the term used for a ditch of this kind, with a flat bottom. The fosse is substantial, running to about 5.5 metres in width and 1.4 metres in depth. On the north-east side, however, the fosse has been largely filled in and the bank has disappeared entirely, most likely the result of agricultural activity over the centuries. The monument's survival elsewhere around its circuit is, given that context, reasonably good.

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