Barrow (Ring Barrow), Crossbeg, Co. Mayo

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Barrows

Barrow (Ring Barrow), Crossbeg, Co. Mayo

On a gentle rise in County Mayo, a small earthen mound sits looking out over ground that was once a lough.

The water is long gone, drained away and turned to farmland, but the mound predates all of that by millennia. It is a ring barrow, a type of prehistoric burial monument consisting of a low circular platform ringed by a ditch, known as a fosse, which was likely heaped up during the Bronze Age as a marker for the dead.

This particular example is modest in its dimensions but coherent in its form. The platform measures roughly seven to eight metres across and stands about 0.85 metres high, with a flattened top of around four metres. Around its base runs the fosse, a shallow encircling ditch between 1.2 and 1.8 metres wide, though it survives unevenly. Sections to the north-east, south-east, and west have silted up entirely or been filled with field clearance stones over the centuries, the casual accumulation of generations of farmers tidying their land. A faint raised lip on the inner edge of the platform hints at the monument's original shaping. The mound itself is partly obscured by gorse and brambles, plants that have, in their way, also helped protect it from more deliberate disturbance.

What gives the site a quiet particularity is its relationship to Crossbeg Lough, 120 metres to the south-west. Whoever raised this mound chose a position with a clear view over the water. That the lough no longer exists, absorbed into the surrounding pasture, makes the barrow's elevated stance feel slightly displaced, a lookout post with nothing left to overlook.

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Pete F
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