Barrow, Clogh, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Barrows

Barrow, Clogh, Co. Galway

In a field of ordinary pastureland in Clogh, County Galway, satellite imagery has revealed the faint outline of something that may be far older than the grass growing over it.

A small circular enclosure, roughly ten metres in diameter, is visible in aerial photography from March 2014, its form suggesting it could be a ring-barrow, a type of prehistoric burial monument typically defined by a low mound or earthen bank encircled by a ditch. The feature is subtle enough that it went unrecorded until relatively recently, the kind of trace that only becomes legible when viewed from above at the right angle and in the right conditions.

The site was identified and reported by Jean-Charles Caillère, whose examination of Google Earth imagery brought it to wider attention. What makes the find more interesting is that a second possible barrow lies approximately twenty-eight metres to the south-west, raising the possibility that this corner of Clogh once contained a small cluster of funerary monuments. Paired or grouped barrows are not unusual in the Irish landscape; the dead were sometimes gathered in proximity, and what survives as a faint crop or soil mark today may once have been a more conspicuous feature of the local terrain. Without excavation, the function and date of either feature remain uncertain, and the designation "possible" is doing real work here.

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Pete F
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