Barrow - mound barrow, Borrisnoe, Co. Tipperary

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Barrows

Barrow – mound barrow, Borrisnoe, Co. Tipperary

Between the first Ordnance Survey of Ireland in 1840 and the revised edition of 1904, a small mound in Borrisnoe quietly made its cartographic debut.

It had presumably been there for centuries before anyone thought to draw it on a map, and by the time surveyors finally did, it was already sharing the field with a cluster of farm buildings that have since vanished entirely, leaving only a corrugated iron shed as their sole representative.

A mound barrow is, in essence, a burial monument, an earthen mound raised over the dead, typically during the Bronze Age in Ireland, though exact dating without excavation remains uncertain. This particular example is an oval earthen mound, oriented roughly northeast to southwest, measuring about eleven metres along its longer axis and nine metres across. It rises to a maximum height of just over a metre at its broadest northeastern end and tapers down toward the southwest. No stonework is visible anywhere on or around it, which is itself a detail worth noting; many barrows conceal stone chambers or kerbing beneath their turf. The mound sits on a gentle slope at the edge of a valley, in rough pastureland, and an old field boundary running north to south meets its eastern side, suggesting that at some point in the agricultural life of the area, whoever was farming here simply worked around the mound rather than levelling it.

The surface today is overgrown and pitted with large burrow holes, the work of animals rather than archaeologists. That disturbance means the interior, if it still holds anything, has had some uninvited attention over the years. There is a particular quality to sites like this one, overlooked on an early map, surrounded by farm buildings now largely gone, slowly being tunnelled from below, and yet still present, still legible as a human act from the distant past.

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