Barrow (Ring Barrow), An Luachair, Co. Kerry

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Barrows

Barrow (Ring Barrow), An Luachair, Co. Kerry

On the Dingle Peninsula, a prehistoric burial monument was erased from the landscape not by centuries of slow decay but by the relatively mundane act of clearing field fences.

The site at An Luachair was a ring barrow, a type of funerary enclosure typically consisting of a low central mound surrounded by a circular bank and ditch, built during the Bronze Age to mark the burial of the dead. This one is gone, levelled during agricultural tidying, and its loss was noted only through local information passed on to archaeologists.

The barrow sat roughly 275 metres east of a related embanked enclosure on the other side of a small tributary of the Emlagh river, suggesting this part of Kerry once held a loose cluster of prehistoric funerary monuments in close proximity. That relationship between the two sites, separated by a modest watercourse, is now the most telling detail that survives. The surrounding area of Corca Dhuibhne, the Dingle Peninsula, is extraordinarily dense with early archaeological remains, and the ring barrow at An Luachair was recorded as part of a comprehensive survey of that landscape published by J. Cuppage in 1986. By the time the record was compiled, the monument had already been destroyed, its embanked form removed along with the field boundaries it happened to neighbour.

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