Barrow - embanked barrow, Corbally, Co. Mayo

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Barrow – embanked barrow, Corbally, Co. Mayo

In a pasture field in Corbally, County Mayo, a prehistoric burial mound sits so quietly in the landscape that cartographers never recorded it.

Not one edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, the standard reference for Irish field monuments across nearly two centuries of surveying, ever marked this barrow on paper. It simply went unnoticed, a small circular earthwork holding its ground while the maps were drawn and redrawn around it.

An embanked barrow is a type of funerary monument, typically prehistoric in origin, consisting of a low earthen bank enclosing a central area that would originally have covered a burial. This example is modest in scale: the raised circular platform measures roughly five to five and a half metres in diameter, defined by a bank approximately two metres wide. The bank stands a little under half a metre high on its south-eastern side and rises to about two-thirds of a metre at the north-west. A low internal rim runs along the inside edge of the bank. A handful of larger stones rest against the outer face of the bank on the south-western side, though these are most likely displaced field clearance stones rather than original structural elements. Fifteen metres to the south-east lies a ringbarrow, a related but distinct monument type, suggesting this elevation in the Mayo countryside was a place of some significance to the communities who shaped it.

The barrow sits on raised ground with open views across rolling grassland and, to the south-east, over a broad stretch of rough wet ground. It is largely hidden beneath clumps of gorse and brambles, which means the earthwork itself is easier to appreciate from a short distance than from directly beside it. Those who find themselves near it should look for the slight but definite rise of the enclosing bank rather than any obvious surface feature at the centre.

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