Barrow (Ring Barrow), Ballylangy, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Barrows
In a tillag field on a south-facing slope in Ballylangy, County Cork, a ring barrow sits in the kind of quiet agricultural setting that has, over centuries, done more damage to prehistoric monuments than almost anything else.
That it survives at all is mildly remarkable. Ring barrows are circular funerary enclosures, typically Bronze Age in date, consisting of a low central mound or level interior ringed by a ditch and an outer bank. They are not the great tumuli of popular imagination but something more modest and, in their own way, more elusive.
This particular example measures roughly ten metres north to south and just under ten metres east to west, making it a compact but clearly defined feature. The enclosing fosse, the term used for the surrounding ditch, reaches a depth of around 0.7 metres, with a low external bank rising to about 0.4 metres. At the north-west, the bank has been levelled over a stretch of 1.2 metres and the fosse partially filled in, almost certainly the result of repeated ploughing across what has long been productive farmland. A causeway at the eastern side of the ditch would originally have provided the single formal point of entry into the interior, a detail that hints at the deliberate, structured nature of the enclosure. The interior itself is level, which is consistent with ring barrows where the burial focus is the enclosed space rather than a raised central mound.