Barrow (Ring Barrow), Ballygambon, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Barrows
A ring barrow is a prehistoric funerary monument, typically a low burial mound enclosed by a circular ditch and an outer earthen bank.
The one at Ballygambon in County Tipperary has a quietly odd biography written into its earthworks. The outer bank along the southern side has been straightened and squared off to a hard corner at the south-east, not by any ancient design, but because a field boundary once ran directly through the monument, bending its prehistoric geometry to meet the demands of agricultural land division. That boundary has since been removed, but its impression on the bank is permanent.
The monument sits in pasture on a gentle south-facing slope and measures roughly 25 metres north to south and 30 metres east to west. It is defined by an internal fosse, a ditch that runs around the perimeter, nearly a metre deep in places but noticeably shallower along the northern arc. The outer bank stands just over a metre high on both its interior and exterior faces. A possible causewayed entrance, a deliberate gap left across the ditch, sits at the southern side and measures about four metres across. Within the northern sector, a depression measuring ten metres by four metres suggests ground disturbance of some kind, though what caused it is not recorded. By 1982, when the monument was noted by Cahill, it had been planted with evergreens, a not uncommon fate for old earthworks pressed into decorative or boundary use. Those trees are now gone, along with the field divisions that once crossed the site. The interior undulates as it slopes southward, and the bank along the south is riddled with rabbit burrows, which have done their own quiet work on the structure over time. Two ringforts lie roughly 230 and 275 metres to the south-south-east, suggesting this corner of Tipperary was a place people kept returning to across long stretches of time.