Barrow - mound barrow, Ballyshea, Co. Galway

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Barrow – mound barrow, Ballyshea, Co. Galway

There is a burial mound in Ballyshea, County Galway, that no longer exists above ground, yet it remains a classified archaeological monument with precise measurements, a reference number, and a place on the map.

What was once a circular earthen mound roughly seventeen metres across and less than a metre high has been so thoroughly eroded or disturbed that no visible surface trace survives today.

When a researcher named McCaffrey catalogued the site in 1952, he recorded it as a tumulus, the general term for a burial mound raised over the dead, and noted its dimensions with some care: fifty-five feet in diameter, two feet and seven inches at its highest point. More suggestively, he also observed stone slabs consistent with a cist, a small stone-lined box burial of the kind used during the Bronze Age to contain human remains. The mound sat some seventy metres to the west of a rath, a roughly circular earthwork enclosure that would once have served as a farmstead, suggesting this corner of east Galway carried layers of use across different periods. Whether the proximity of the two monuments was coincidental or reflected some longer continuity of significance in the landscape is not something the surviving record can answer.

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