Barrow (Ditch barrow), Mooresfort, Co. Tipperary

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Barrow (Ditch barrow), Mooresfort, Co. Tipperary

In a field of improved pasture near Mooresfort in County Tipperary, a faint circular depression in the ground marks what was once a ditch barrow, a type of prehistoric funerary monument defined not by a raised mound but by a shallow encircling fosse, or ditch, that set the burial space apart from the surrounding land.

The remains here are modest: a roughly circular area measuring about five metres north to south and five and a half metres east to west, enclosed by a fosse just two metres wide and barely ten centimetres deep. That it survives at all, in a working agricultural field, is quietly remarkable.

The ground on which it sits carries its own layered history. The barrow occupies a level stretch of elevated land that once flanked the eastern and south-eastern edges of a lake, drained away during improvement works carried out sometime in the 1870s or 1880s. What was a lakeside or lake-margin landscape in earlier centuries became dry pasture within living memory of the late nineteenth century, and the barrow has sat through that transformation largely unrecorded until Alison McQueen and Vera Rahilly identified it during a field survey on 28 November 2008. It does not stand alone: two ring-barrows, which typically consist of a low mound surrounded by a ditch and outer bank, lie just nine metres and approximately thirty-six metres to the south-south-west and south-west respectively, suggesting this corner of Tipperary held some significance in the prehistoric funerary landscape.

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Pete F
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