Barrow (Ditch barrow), Ballynacree, Co. Tipperary

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Barrow (Ditch barrow), Ballynacree, Co. Tipperary

In a wet, level pasture in Ballynacree, County Tipperary, there is a circular feature that most walkers would step across without a second thought.

Four metres in diameter, it is defined by a fosse, a shallow ditch cut into the earth, so slight that approaching from the north-west it barely registers as a depression at all. The overall width of the fosse reaches 1.8 metres, but at its base it narrows to 0.6 metres, and its depth measures only 0.1 metres. This is not a monument that announces itself.

What it is, quietly and without drama, is a ditch barrow, a form of prehistoric funerary monument in which a circular area is enclosed or delimited by a surrounding ditch rather than built up into a mound. No entrance feature is visible, and the interior undulates slightly across its modest circumference. It sits within a small cluster of related features: a second ditch barrow lies just 16 metres to the south-south-west, and a ringfort, the remains of an enclosed early medieval farmstead, stands roughly 90 metres to the south-west. The proximity of monuments from different periods is not unusual in the Irish landscape, where prehistoric burial sites were sometimes reused or simply left alone as later communities settled nearby, perhaps conscious that the ground already carried meaning.

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Pete F
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