Barrow (Ring Barrow), Farna, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Barrows
In the townland of Farna in County Kerry, a ring barrow sits in the landscape, its circular earthen form marking a burial from the prehistoric past.
Ring barrows are among the more quietly persistent features of the Irish countryside: a central mound or flat area enclosed by a ditch and an outer bank, raised by communities who buried their dead with considerable ceremony during the Bronze Age, and sometimes into the Iron Age. They are easy to overlook, and that is part of what makes them worth attention. Unlike the great passage tombs that draw visitors to Meath, these smaller monuments have largely been left to the fields and the grass, attended only by whatever history the surrounding soil holds.
The Farna example is recorded as a monument of archaeological significance in Kerry, a county that carries an unusually dense concentration of prehistoric remains, from promontory forts along its Atlantic headlands to standing stones and fulacht fiadh, the enigmatic burnt mounds associated with cooking or ritual, scattered across its interior. Ring barrows in Kerry have been found to date broadly from the second and first millennia BC, and while individual sites vary considerably in their condition and context, the form itself speaks to a period when the dead were placed within a bounded, marked space, separated from the living world by a circular boundary that seems to have carried both practical and symbolic meaning. Without excavation or detailed field records specific to this site, little more can be said about who was buried here or when, but the monument's survival into the present is itself a kind of record.
