Barrow - mound barrow, Quignalecka, Co. Mayo

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Barrow – mound barrow, Quignalecka, Co. Mayo

Beneath what is now a housing estate on the outskirts of Ballina, a circular earthen mound once sat on a low natural knoll, commanding views of the Ox Mountains to the south-east and Nephin Mountain to the south-west, with the confluence of the River Moy and its tributary the Brusna just 700 metres away.

A mound barrow, the kind of raised funerary monument most commonly associated with the Bronze Age and Iron Age, it looked unremarkable enough before excavation, roughly twelve to fourteen metres across and gently domed in profile, with an ash tree and a whitethorn growing on its eastern flank. It no longer exists in any physical sense; after excavation was completed, the knoll on which it stood was removed entirely to make way for development.

What made the site archaeologically unusual was what the digging revealed about its age. Testing began in 2007 in advance of the housing development, with full excavation following under the direction of Wallace in 2018. Beneath layers of modern debris, including iron nails, a clay pipe stem, and lumps of mortar, lay a distinctive band of yellow-orange fine sand. At its centre sat a large, flat stone slab covered in charcoal and ash, surrounded by heat-shattered granite and patches of scorching. Below the slab, a stone-lined pit roughly 1.2 metres across showed intense burning consistent with a cremation pyre; a small channel at its north-western edge may have served as a duct for bellows to raise the temperature. Tiny fragments of burnt bone and a piece of worked flint were recovered from the pit fill. Three further pits on the southern side of the mound yielded more material, including sherds identified as belonging to the Western Neolithic Tradition, a style of plain, shouldered pottery produced during the fourth and early third millennia BC. Specialist analysis placed one vessel at around 3700 BC, and a radiocarbon date from charcoal in one of the pits returned a range of 2880 to 2580 BC. Barrow monuments of this type are known principally as Bronze Age or Iron Age constructions, making Neolithic activity here a genuinely unexpected finding, suggesting the site saw ceremonial or funerary use centuries, possibly millennia, before the mound itself was raised.

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