Barrow, Lisnarawer, Co. Sligo

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Barrows

Barrow, Lisnarawer, Co. Sligo

In a field of undulating pasture in County Sligo, a low circular mound sits so quietly in the landscape that it might easily be mistaken for a natural rise in the ground.

It is not. The feature at Lisnarawer is a barrow, one of the most ancient and widespread burial monument types found across Ireland, in which a raised platform of earth marks a site of funerary significance. This one is modest in scale, ten metres in diameter and just thirty centimetres above the surrounding ground, but its form is deliberate and its edges carefully defined.

The mound is enclosed by a bank of earth and stone roughly two and a half metres wide, which survives to an internal height of about half a metre. On the eastern and south-eastern sides, the enclosing element shifts from a built bank to a low scarp, a cut or eroded edge in the ground surface rather than a raised construction. At the north-western arc there are traces of what may be an external fosse, a shallow ditch that would originally have helped to define and separate the monument from the surrounding land. Two gaps break the enclosing bank, one to the north at around two metres wide and another to the east at just under two metres. Whether these represent original entrance points or later disturbance is not recorded, and barrows of this type rarely yield easy answers without excavation.

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