Barrow (Ring Barrow), Carriganimmy, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Barrows
At the top of a hill west of Musherabeg in mid-Cork, a low earthen ring barely half a metre high marks a circle roughly thirteen metres across.
At its centre sit a flat flagstone and two white quartzite stones, a quiet arrangement that has been there far longer than anyone can reliably say. This is a ring barrow, a type of prehistoric funerary monument in which a circular bank of earth encloses a burial area, and this particular example carries within it the faint traces of people who left something behind before the bog grew over everything.
What gives the site its texture is not the visible structure alone but what came out of the ground nearby. Around 1913, a man named Tim Roche was cutting turf on the hill when he reportedly uncovered an urn, the kind of ceramic vessel commonly associated with Bronze Age cremation burials. Later, a formal investigation by E. Fahy of the Department of Archaeology at University College Cork turned up what is described as a coarse flat-bottomed pot beneath the blanket bog, a find recorded by Doody in 1986. Blanket bog, which accumulates slowly over millennia, can preserve and conceal objects for thousands of years, and its presence here suggests the landscape has changed considerably since whoever built this monument first broke the ground. The two white quartzite stones at the centre are worth noting; quartzite was frequently used in prehistoric Ireland in ceremonial or funerary contexts, possibly for its reflective quality in certain lights, though what significance it held for the people who placed these particular stones here is not recorded.
The surrounding land has been planted with young coniferous trees, which affects both the visibility of the monument and the feel of approaching it. The earthen bank is low and might easily be missed without some expectation of what to look for, but the central stones, especially the pale quartzite, offer a clear focal point once you are within the ring.