Barrow - mound barrow, Drumrahan, Co. Leitrim

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Barrow – mound barrow, Drumrahan, Co. Leitrim

On the rounded crest of a drumlin in County Leitrim, a low earthen mound sits quietly in grass and scrub, its flat top barely two metres above the surrounding ground.

What makes it quietly anomalous is partly what it is and partly how it persists: a mound barrow, the kind of prehistoric funerary monument raised over the dead thousands of years ago, still legible in the landscape despite centuries of agricultural pressure and the slow creep of field boundaries around it.

A barrow of this type is essentially an earthen burial mound, sometimes encircled by a fosse, a shallow ditched depression, and occasionally an outer bank. Here, the fosse survives in faint traces, best preserved on the northern side, where it reaches a base width of around two metres and an external depth of roughly thirty centimetres. The mound itself tapers from a base diameter of ten metres down to a flattened top of just under three metres across. No outer bank remains, and a field bank running roughly north-north-west to south-south-east along the eastern edge has been removed, suggesting that later farming activity has eaten into what may once have been a more complete monument. By 1835, when the first Ordnance Survey six-inch maps were being drawn up across Ireland, the site was already reduced to a small cluster of bushes on the drumlin summit, recognisable as a feature but no longer obviously understood as an ancient structure. That early map record is now one of the few fixed points for tracing what has changed around it.

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