Barrow, Knocknahur, Co. Sligo

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Barrows

Barrow, Knocknahur, Co. Sligo

At Knocknahur in County Sligo, a low ring of earth barely breaks the surface of the surrounding ground.

It would be easy to walk past without registering it as anything more than a slight unevenness in the field, yet what it marks is a barrow, one of the burial monuments that punctuate the Irish landscape from the Bronze Age onward.

The site consists of a circular area twelve metres in internal diameter, defined by a low bank roughly 1.70 metres wide and only 0.20 metres high, with an external ditch running around it that measures 2.50 metres wide and 0.30 metres deep. These modest dimensions, recorded by Timoney in 1984, are fairly typical of ring barrows, a form of funerary monument in which a central space, presumably once containing a burial, is set apart from the surrounding land by a combination of bank and ditch. The shallowness of both features today is a reminder of how much can erode or be ploughed away over millennia, leaving only the faintest outline of what was once a deliberately constructed and socially significant boundary between the living and the dead.

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Pete F
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