Barrow (Ring Barrow), Kishkeam, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Barrows
In a field near Kishkeam in north Cork, a barely perceptible rise in the ground marks what was once a ring barrow, a type of prehistoric burial monument consisting of a low central mound enclosed by a circular ditch, or fosse.
The mound here is now only about a quarter of a metre high, and the surrounding fosse has been reduced to a shallow depression roughly fifteen centimetres deep. The whole structure measures just over five metres across, which gives some sense of how modest these monuments could be even before centuries of agricultural use wore them down further.
The site was noted by Bowman in 1934, who recorded it as already levelled by that point, with the surrounding earthwork measuring thirty-four feet in diameter and the base of the mound itself around eighteen feet across. That the mound survived at all, even in this diminished form, is perhaps the more surprising detail. Ring barrows are generally associated with the Bronze Age, though they continued to be used into the early medieval period in Ireland, and they tend to cluster in areas that were once considered ceremonially or socially significant. What lies beneath the soil at Kishkeam has not been recorded here; the mound's original contents, whether a cremation, an inhumation, or simply a marker of territory, remain unknown.
The monument sits in pasture amid the rolling countryside of north Cork. There is little to draw the eye from a distance; the slight elevation and the faint curve of the old fosse are most legible when the light is low and raking, the kind of conditions that make early morning or late afternoon the better time to read the faint geometry of what remains.