Barrow (Ring Barrow), Deerpark, Co. Galway

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Barrow (Ring Barrow), Deerpark, Co. Galway

In a tillage field in Deerpark, County Galway, there is a prehistoric burial monument that has spent centuries being slowly erased.

What remains is barely legible as archaeology at all: a ring barrow, a type of burial monument typically consisting of a central mound covering human remains, surrounded by a circular ditch, that was once a deliberate marker in the landscape and is now little more than a slight grassy swelling in a ploughed field.

The monument is described as very poorly preserved. Its subcircular enclosure measures roughly 14.6 metres north to south and 13.5 metres east to west. The central mound, which would once have risen to a more commanding height, has been almost completely levelled and now stands only 0.35 to 0.4 metres above the surrounding ground. Around it, a shallow fosse, the ring-shaped ditch that gives this class of monument its name, survives to a width of around 1.4 metres. Ring barrows of this type belong broadly to the Bronze Age, a period spanning roughly 2500 to 500 BC in Ireland, when the burial of the dead beneath earthen mounds was common across the island. That this one survives at all, even in so degraded a form, is a reminder of how much of that funerary landscape has quietly vanished beneath successive generations of farming.

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Pete F
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