Barrow - mound barrow, Knockgraffon, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Barrows

Barrow – mound barrow, Knockgraffon, Co. Tipperary

On the summit of Knockillon Hill in County Tipperary, just below a triangulation station at 402 feet, sits a low earthen mound that has clearly attracted attention over the centuries, though not always the careful kind.

Someone, at some point, dug into the top of it, leaving a hollow at the crown that gives the mound an oddly scooped appearance, as though something was removed or searched for and never properly filled back in.

The mound is a barrow, a burial monument of the type raised across Ireland during the Bronze Age, typically over the remains of the dead and sometimes accompanied by grave goods. This particular example measures roughly 13 metres across at its base and rises between 1.26 and 1.83 metres depending on which side you measure, the southern and eastern faces being the higher. It is built from clay with some stones and gravel mixed through. Around its eastern side there is a slight depression about 1.6 metres wide, partially obscured by dead wood and nettles, which may be a remnant of the external fosse, the shallow ditch, that would often have encircled such a monument. No comparable trace survives on the northern or western sides. Immediately to the south-east, a separate enclosure sits close enough to suggest the two features were once part of the same landscape of activity, and on a clear day another cairn is visible on a hilltop roughly six and a half kilometres to the south-west, a reminder that these elevated sites were chosen with a certain awareness of the terrain around them.

The mound is grass-covered and partly nettle-choked, with some erosion on the north-eastern slope from animal activity. The hollow at its summit, whatever caused it, is now the most immediately legible feature, and it is this that gives the place its slightly unsettled quality, the sense of something interrupted rather than simply ancient and undisturbed.

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Pete F
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