Barrow (Ring Barrow), Dromskarragh More, Co. Cork

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Barrow (Ring Barrow), Dromskarragh More, Co. Cork

In the garden of a house in Dromskarragh More, on the south side of a domestic building in north County Cork, a prehistoric ring barrow survives in a quietly compromised state.

A ring barrow is a circular burial monument, typically from the Bronze Age, consisting of a low earthen bank enclosing a central area where human remains or cremated material were interred. This one measures roughly ten metres east to west and just under nine and a half metres north to south, with an internal bank height of about a quarter of a metre and an external height of just over half a metre. There is a narrow opening, about a metre wide, in the bank to the south-southwest, which may represent an original entrance or later disturbance. A later extension to the house has cut into the northern side of the bank, leaving the monument only partially intact.

The site has been on record for some time. Writing in 1934, a researcher named Bowman described it as a tumulus that had already been levelled, noting an outer fence roughly two feet high and a diameter of thirty-three feet, figures that correspond reasonably well with the dimensions recorded in more recent surveys. The word "levelled" in Bowman's account suggests that by the early twentieth century the monument had already lost much of whatever height it once carried, whether through deliberate clearance, agricultural pressure, or simply the slow encroachment of domestic use. The fact that it survived at all inside a garden boundary, however reduced, is a mild curiosity in itself. Ring barrows of this kind were once scattered across the Irish landscape in considerable numbers; most have been ploughed out or built over entirely, which makes even a fragmentary example of some interest to those tracing the prehistoric burial geography of Cork.

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