Barrow (Ring Barrow), Tullig, Co. Cork

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Barrow (Ring Barrow), Tullig, Co. Cork

In a level pasture near Tullig, a low circular earthwork sits so quietly in the landscape that it was already being written off as nearly gone in 1937.

This is a ring barrow, a type of prehistoric funerary monument in which a burial, or the memory of one, is enclosed within a rounded earthen bank, often accompanied by an internal or external ditch. The example at Tullig measures roughly nine metres across and retains a bank no more than sixty centimetres at its highest point, with a few stones still visible at the surface. To the south, the ground rises towards Musheramore, but the monument itself occupies flat ground, the kind of unassuming spot where such things tend to quietly persist or quietly disappear.

By 1937, a writer named Broker recorded it as sitting on the land of a Michael Kelliher, describing it as a fort of less than a sixteenth of an acre and noting it was almost levelled. The confusion of a ring barrow with a fort is understandable; both leave similar impressions on the ground, and the distinction between a monument built for the dead and one raised for defence or settlement is not always obvious from surface remains alone. What Broker recorded as nearly gone has, apparently, continued to survive in much the same condition, the southern portion of the bank partially levelled but the overall circular form still legible in the pasture.

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