Barrow (Ditch barrow), Mooresfort, Co. Tipperary

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Barrow (Ditch barrow), Mooresfort, Co. Tipperary

In a field of level, improved pasture in Mooresfort, County Tipperary, a prehistoric burial monument survives in a form so reduced by time and agriculture that it is barely legible to the casual eye.

This is a ditch barrow, a type of funerary enclosure in which the defining feature is not a mound but a fosse, a shallow encircling ditch, that marks off a roughly oval interior. At ground level, the difference between inside and outside amounts to just ten centimetres. The ditch itself is only twenty centimetres deep and a little over two metres wide. What was once a deliberate boundary between the living and the buried dead has been worn down to almost nothing.

The monument encloses an oval area measuring roughly five metres on its northeast to southwest axis and four metres across. The fosse runs from the south, around the west, to the north-northeast, and the interior has been further flattened across its southeastern sector, where the ground slopes almost imperceptibly down into the surviving ditch line. Two related ditch barrows lie nearby, one roughly thirty-four metres to the north-northeast, the other only about four and a half metres to the west-southwest, suggesting this small corner of Tipperary once held a loose cluster of such monuments, perhaps marking a community of burials in the landscape over an extended period. The presence of the monument was confirmed not just by survey on the ground but by an aerial photograph, on which it appears as a sub-circular anomaly, that faint but telling trace that marks it out from the surrounding field even when the earthwork itself has nearly vanished.

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Pete F
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