Barrow, Lisdoonvarna, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Barrows
In a damp field near Lisdoonvarna, rising so slightly from the wet pasture around it that most people would walk straight past, sits a prehistoric barrow that has been quietly mapped and quietly ignored for well over a century.
A barrow is essentially a burial mound, typically from the Bronze Age, built to mark or contain the dead, and this one in County Clare is notable less for its drama than for its near-total absence of it. The central interior sits fractionally higher than its edges, covered in reeds, and surrounded by a shallow fosse, the encircling ditch that would once have defined the monument's boundary, and the faint traces of a low outer bank.
The structure is subcircular in plan, measuring roughly 22.5 metres north to south and 21.2 metres east to west internally. The fosse reaches a maximum depth of only 25 centimetres and a width of between 2.4 and 4 metres, while the outer bank, where it survives at all, rises no more than 25 centimetres above the surrounding ground. The monument appeared on the Ordnance Survey 25-inch plan as early as 1897, marked with hachures, the small radiating lines surveyors used to indicate earthwork features, and again on the Cassini edition of the 6-inch map in 1920. By the time of the Record of Monuments and Places in 1996, it had been reclassified simply as an enclosure, a designation that hints at how worn and ambiguous it had become. Later field banks running west to north-north-east have further obscured the outer bank, folding the ancient boundary into the more recent geometry of agricultural division.