Barrow, Annagh, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Barrows

Barrow, Annagh, Co. Kerry

Two low mounds rise from a stretch of marshy grassland on the west bank of a small Kerry river, roughly two hundred metres from the coast.

They are easy to miss, and the land around them gives little away: rough grazing for cattle, prone to flooding, scattered with low banks of earth and stone whose purpose nobody has yet worked out. These are barrows, the burial mounds that prehistoric communities raised over their dead, and they sit here in a quietly ambiguous landscape that has done as much to shape them as the people who originally built them.

The smaller of the two mounds lies around fifteen metres south of its companion. It measures approximately four metres north to south and five metres east to west at its base, and rises to a height of 1.25 metres. That modest scale is partly a product of time and water: the eastern side has been eaten away, most likely by repeated flooding from the river beside which it stands, and the top carries a shallow depression, some two metres by three, worn about twenty centimetres deep. The mound itself appears to have been constructed from a mixture of stone and earth, which makes it a relatively composite structure. The larger mound to the north belongs to the same complex, though whether the banks of earth and stone scattered across the surrounding ground were ever functionally connected to the barrows remains an open question. Michael Connolly recorded both features during a survey of the Lee Valley area carried out between 1996 and 1997, and the uncertainties he noted then have not since been resolved.

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Pete F
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