Barrow (Ring Barrow), Corballymore And Camgort, Co. Galway

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Barrows

Barrow (Ring Barrow), Corballymore And Camgort, Co. Galway

Sitting in level grassland on the Galway plain, this ring barrow has survived in remarkably complete condition, its circular geometry still clearly readable in the landscape after what is likely several thousand years.

Ring barrows are prehistoric funerary monuments, broadly of Bronze Age date, in which a central burial mound or platform is enclosed by a surrounding ditch, known as a fosse, and an outer earthen bank. Most have been reduced to faint crop marks or ploughed entirely out of existence, which makes the preservation here quietly unusual.

The monument measures just under thirty metres across its full diameter, with a flat-topped central platform about fourteen metres wide and half a metre high at its maximum. That low, table-like profile is typical of the type, though the large boulders found along the northern edge of the platform are a notable detail. Their arrangement suggests they may once have formed a revetment, a facing of stone used to retain and stabilise the earthen mound rather than simply occurring at random. A gap of just over five metres in the outer bank on the west-north-west side may represent the original entrance to the enclosure, a feature sometimes seen in ring barrows where a deliberate causeway was left across the fosse. Hawthorn bushes have since taken hold on the monument itself, which is a familiar sight on undisturbed earthworks in Ireland; hawthorn has long been associated in folk tradition with fairy ground, and that association has almost certainly helped preserve many such sites from casual disturbance over the centuries.

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Pete F
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