Barrow (Ring Barrow), Ballyweelin, Co. Sligo

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Barrow (Ring Barrow), Ballyweelin, Co. Sligo

At Ballyweelin in County Sligo, a prehistoric burial mound sits in the middle of a rocky elevated pasture, so flattened and interfered with that it could easily be mistaken for a natural undulation in the ground.

This is a ring barrow, a type of funerary monument typically consisting of a low central mound encircled by a ditch or bank, constructed during the Bronze Age to mark the burial or commemoration of the dead. What makes this particular example quietly remarkable is not what survives but what was done to it, and how the evidence of that interference is still legible in the landscape if you know what you are looking for.

The central mound, roughly ten metres across at its base and now only about twenty centimetres high, was at some point deliberately opened. Whoever dug into it removed the interior material and threw it outward, creating an irregular surrounding bank that reads almost like an inverted version of the original monument. Around the mound's external base there was once a berm, a flat platform-like space separating the mound from its outer bank, but along the south-west to north-east arc this feature has disappeared entirely. More telling still, the outer bank on the north-east to south-west axis was incorporated into a field boundary at some point, folded into the everyday agricultural geometry of the landscape so thoroughly that old boundary banks now connect to it from two directions. The prehistoric and the post-medieval have, in effect, merged into a single earthwork that no longer clearly announces what it once was.

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Pete F
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