Barrow (Ring Barrow), Dromskarragh Beg, Co. Cork
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Barrows
In a pasture field on a north-facing slope in Dromskarragh Beg, there is a circular earthwork that most people passing through County Cork would take for a natural rise in the ground.
It is, in fact, a ring barrow, a form of prehistoric funerary monument in which a central mound is surrounded by a ditch, known as a fosse, and an outer earthen bank, creating a series of concentric rings that once defined a ritual or burial space. This one is modest in scale but structurally coherent: the central raised area reaches about half a metre in height and measures roughly ten metres across, while the enclosing bank rises to about 1.35 metres on its inner face and 0.45 metres on its outer edge.
What gives this particular monument an additional layer of interest is the way it has been caught between two eras of land use. Ordnance Survey maps from 1904 show a north-to-south field fence running directly across the site, bisecting the monument as though it were simply an inconvenient hump in the landscape. By the time a revised map was made in 1937, that fence had largely disappeared, removed except where it still crosses the earthwork itself. The remains of the old fence line are still visible in the interior of the barrow today, accompanied by shallow drainage channels on either side, physical traces of the agricultural reorganisation that briefly cut straight through something considerably older. The monument also has two deliberate breaks in its outer bank, one to the north measuring 5.2 metres wide and one to the south at 6 metres, which may represent original entrance points into the enclosed space.