Barrow (Ring Barrow), Corbally, Co. Mayo

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Barrow (Ring Barrow), Corbally, Co. Mayo

In the pastureland of Corbally in County Mayo, a circular earthwork sits on a gentle rise, its prehistoric origins now partially obscured by gorse, brambles, and the burrowing of animals.

This is a ring barrow, a type of funerary monument typically dating to the Bronze Age, consisting of a low rounded mound or flat central area enclosed by an earthen bank and an outer ditch. The example here is modest in scale, with a diameter of around seven metres measured to the middle of the bank, but its placement on elevated ground is deliberate and characteristic, looking out over rolling grassland and, to the south-east, a wide stretch of rough, wet terrain.

The monument went unrecorded on the Ordnance Survey's six-inch mapping of 1838, which suggests it was either overlooked or not yet clearly visible as a defined feature. By 1917, however, it had been noted on a revised edition, marked as a small hachured circle, the conventional cartographic shorthand for an earthwork of this kind. What survives today is an earthen bank measuring between two and a half and three metres wide, rising roughly forty centimetres on its inner face and seventy centimetres on the outer. Around the bank runs a fosse, essentially a shallow encircling ditch, about one and a half metres wide. A deeper section of this fosse on the eastern side may point to more recent disturbance rather than any original feature of the construction. Fifteen metres to the north-west lies a second monument, an embanked barrow, making this a paired or clustered funerary landscape, which is not unusual for the period; Bronze Age communities often returned to the same elevated ground when marking their dead.

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