Barrow, Carrowgobbadagh, Co. Sligo
Co. Sligo |
Barrows
In a field in Carrowgobbadagh, County Sligo, there is nothing to see, and that absence is precisely the point.
A barrow, the term used for a prehistoric burial mound, once occupied this spot, and its presence was still legible on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1913, recorded as a small circular feature with hachures, the short radiating lines surveyors used to indicate a raised or mounded form on the landscape. By the time anyone thought to look more closely at the ground itself, the mound was gone.
The 1913 map represents one of the later revisions of the Irish OS six-inch series, a body of cartographic work that has become, almost by accident, one of the more important archaeological records in the country, preserving the outlines of earthworks that subsequent decades of farming and land clearance quietly erased. The barrow at Carrowgobbadagh fits that pattern precisely. At some point after the map was made, the mound was levelled and the surrounding field boundaries reorganised or removed. No surface trace survives. What the site looked like before it disappeared, how old it was, or what it may have contained are questions the ground can no longer answer.