Barrow (Ring Barrow), Knockaunvickteera, Co. Clare

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Barrows

Barrow (Ring Barrow), Knockaunvickteera, Co. Clare

In a pasture field on a north-facing slope in County Clare, there is a low mound so modest in scale that a person crossing the field might easily take it for a natural undulation in the ground.

It is barely twenty to thirty centimetres high and only six and a half metres across, yet it is almost certainly a ring barrow, one of a class of prehistoric burial monuments in which a central mound is encircled by a shallow ditch, or fosse. The fosse here is flat-bottomed, between two and a half and nearly four metres wide, and it wraps almost perfectly around the mound, giving the whole structure a nearly circular plan roughly fourteen metres across at its widest. At the very centre of the mound there is a small circular depression, just a metre in diameter, the kind of subtle hollow that can indicate a burial chamber beneath, or simply the slow settling of centuries of soil.

The site sits roughly forty metres south of the Aille River, which runs east to west through this part of Clare, and the slope on which the barrow rests would have offered a clear view northward across the river valley. The antiquarian T. J. Westropp noted the monument as early as 1907, and it was formally recorded in the Record of Monuments and Places in 1996, though with the cautious designation of "ring-barrow possible", reflecting the difficulty of classifying such a low-lying and unexcavated feature without further investigation. Ring barrows are generally associated with the Bronze Age, used as funerary monuments for the dead, though their precise dating and function vary considerably from site to site. The particular combination here, a domed central mound, encircling fosse, and central depression, is consistent with the type, even if the ground alone cannot confirm it.

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