Barrow, Cahernahoon, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Barrows

Barrow, Cahernahoon, Co. Galway

A field wall, built without any apparent ceremony across ordinary north Galway farmland, has quietly bisected a prehistoric burial monument, leaving half of it effectively invisible.

To the east of that wall, no surface trace of the structure survives at all. To the west, however, the form of a barrow, a mounded earthen burial monument typically raised during the Bronze Age, remains legible: a low central mound roughly seven metres across, ringed by a fosse, which is a shallow ditch, and an encircling earthen bank beyond it. The whole structure, where it can still be read, measures around 22.5 metres from north to south.

Barrows of this subcircular type are found across Ireland, usually marking the burial place of an individual or a small number of people, and often dating to somewhere in the second millennium BC. This particular example sits in low-lying, level farmland in the townland of Cahernahoon, a quietly unremarkable setting that would have looked considerably different in prehistory, likely more open heathland or scrub than the enclosed agricultural fields that now surround it. The gradual enclosure of Irish land over the post-medieval centuries brought with it the building of boundary walls that, being practical rather than archaeological, had little reason to respect what lay beneath the turf. The result here is a monument that has been interrupted, its eastern half levelled or buried under disturbed ground, its western half persisting as a slight earthwork that most people walking the land would pass without a second glance.

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Pete F
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