Barrow (Ring Barrow), Castlegal, Co. Sligo

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Barrow (Ring Barrow), Castlegal, Co. Sligo

On a low hillock in the gently rolling pasture of Castlegal in County Sligo, there is a circle in the ground that most walkers would step across without a second thought.

It measures eleven metres across, its enclosing bank rising only thirty centimetres above the interior, and yet it is the remains of a ring barrow, a type of prehistoric funerary monument in which a burial, typically cremated remains, was placed within a low mound and surrounded by a circular earthen bank and an outer ditch known as a fosse. The whole thing is subtle almost to the point of invisibility, which is part of what makes it worth attending to.

The structure follows the classic ring barrow form: a circular raised area defined by a bank roughly two and a half metres wide, with a fosse, or encircling ditch, running around its outer edge. That ditch is just over two metres wide and descends to about thirty-five centimetres in depth, enough to have been a meaningful boundary in its original condition. Most intriguing is the centre of the interior, where a slightly raised area four metres in diameter, edged by a faint scarped edge, may represent the eroded remains of a central burial mound. A gap in the bank, with what looks like a rough causeway thrown across the fosse, is thought to be a later, probably modern, intervention rather than any original entrance. Ring barrows of this kind are generally associated with the Bronze Age, though they continued to be used into the early medieval period in Ireland, and their precise date is rarely recoverable without excavation.

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Pete F
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