Barrow, Camp, Co. Kerry

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Barrows

Barrow, Camp, Co. Kerry

On a limestone reef near Camp in County Kerry, a prehistoric barrow sits in a state of considerable uncertainty.

The reef itself rises above the surrounding land and offers unobstructed views in all directions, the southern aspect being particularly open, yet what survives on its surface is frustratingly difficult to read. A circular hollow some ten metres in diameter and half a metre deep lies to the south of the main site cluster, but overgrowth makes it impossible to say whether any enclosing bank or kerb ever surrounded it. Loose limestone is scattered throughout the area, hinting at structures that no longer hold their shape.

The damage here is not simply the work of time. When surveyed in the late 1990s as part of a study of the Lee Valley area, the reef was found to lie within a working dairy farm, and the effects of agricultural activity were plain. An attempt to reclaim the land had already stripped much of what once stood here, and cattle had further trampled the surface. Most tellingly, a substantial stone wall running north to south had been built straight through the reef, nearly bisecting it, and it appears to have been constructed at least partly from material robbed out of the very enclosures and banks it destroyed. The sites lie roughly three hundred metres west of a separate cairn complex in the same townland, suggesting this was once a more extensive prehistoric landscape, though what that landscape originally looked like is now largely a matter of inference.

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Pete F
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