Barrow - mound barrow, Culleenamore, Co. Sligo

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Barrows

Barrow – mound barrow, Culleenamore, Co. Sligo

A low, oval mound rising out of pastureland near Culleenamore in County Sligo is easy to walk past without a second thought.

It is tidy, sod-covered, and clear of scrub, sitting on a very slight rise in gently undulating ground with the natural surface falling away on its north-eastern side. Nothing about it announces itself as ancient. And that, in a way, is precisely the problem: nobody is entirely sure that it is.

A barrow is, in its simplest form, a burial mound, an earthen or stone-built structure raised over the dead, and examples in Ireland range from Neolithic passage tombs to early medieval grave mounds spanning several thousand years of funerary practice. This particular mound measures roughly ten metres along its base from north-west to south-east, narrowing to about 4.5 metres across its flat top, and stands between 1.2 and 1.6 metres high. It is composed of earth and stone, with no fosse, the surrounding ditch that typically accompanies a mound barrow, visible at ground level. That absence is notable, though not conclusive either way. Writing in 1984, researcher M. Timoney recorded a local belief that the mound may actually date from the nineteenth century, which would place it outside the prehistoric or early medieval periods entirely and into the realm of agricultural or memorial earthworks of a far more recent and less examined kind. The belief has not been confirmed, but it has not been dismissed either, and it leaves the mound suspended in a genuinely unresolved category.

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Pete F
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