Barrow, Ballintruer More, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Barrows
Beneath a field in Ballintruer More, County Wicklow, a circular earthwork roughly twenty metres across may be hiding in plain sight.
The site exists, at present, primarily as a cropmark, a faint differential in how vegetation grows above buried features, captured in aerial photography rather than discovered by anyone walking the land. At ground level, there is nothing to see.
The enclosure is defined by a fosse, a ditch cut into the earth, forming a ring that suggests this may once have been a barrow, a burial mound of the kind raised across Ireland during the Bronze Age or earlier. Barrows typically served as monuments to the dead, sometimes covering a central burial, sometimes functioning more as territorial or ceremonial markers in the landscape. This one sits on a gentle north-west facing slope, and its possible existence was identified not by excavation but by scrutiny of aerial photographs. Without ground investigation, the classification remains tentative, the word "possibly" doing a great deal of work in what little is known about it.