Barrow, Clara, Co. Kilkenny

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Barrows

Barrow, Clara, Co. Kilkenny

In a field of reclaimed pasture in Clara, County Kilkenny, something ancient persists without being visible to the naked eye.

A circular enclosure roughly nineteen metres across appears in satellite imagery only as a cropmark, the faint differential in plant growth that betrays a buried or levelled structure beneath the soil. Whatever was once here has been flattened entirely, absorbed into the working landscape around it.

The site was recorded as a small circular enclosure on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1839, and it was still marked on the 1900 revision, suggesting it retained some physical presence above ground at least into the late nineteenth century. Its modest diameter is the main clue to its nature: enclosures of this size are more consistent with a barrow, a burial mound of the kind constructed throughout Ireland from the Neolithic into the early medieval period, than with a ringfort or other settlement feature. At some point between the 1900 mapping and the present day, the monument was levelled, most likely cleared to improve agricultural land. By the time satellite imagery captured the site in November 2005, only the cropmark remained, a ghostly ring readable from above but invisible at ground level.

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Pete F
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