Barrow (Ring Barrow), Knockawillin, Co. Cork
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Barrows
In a level pasture at Knockawillin in north Cork, there is a burial monument that no longer exists above ground.
A ring barrow, a type of low circular burial mound typically enclosed by a surrounding earthen bank or ditch known as a vallum, was levelled around 1974, leaving no visible surface trace. It is one of those archaeological sites that survives only in the written record, a presence defined entirely by its absence.
The site may be one of three mounds recorded in 1934 by a researcher named Bowman, who documented them in a field locally called "The Lios", a name suggesting a long-held awareness that the land held something old and deliberate. Bowman described three distinct features: the first a mound roughly three feet high with a flat top spanning twenty-one feet across; the second slightly taller at four feet, enclosed by a vallum with an outer diameter of fifty-three feet and a mound base of twenty-eight feet; the third an irregular shaped mound about three feet high, covering approximately twenty-seven square yards. The second of these, with its clearly described surrounding bank, fits most closely the profile of a ring barrow. Two further ring barrows, or possible ring barrows, have been identified nearby, one roughly twenty-five metres to the south and another about twenty metres to the south-east, suggesting this was once a small but meaningful concentration of funerary monuments in the prehistoric landscape.