Barrow (Ring Barrow), Leamaneh, Co. Clare

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Barrow (Ring Barrow), Leamaneh, Co. Clare

On a low knoll in County Clare, just below an east-facing slope and beside a quiet north-south stream, a prehistoric burial monument survives in a state that rewards careful looking rather than a casual glance.

This is a ring-barrow, a type of funerary earthwork typical of the Bronze Age in Ireland, consisting of a central mound enclosed by a circular or near-circular ditch and an outer bank. Here, the whole arrangement measures roughly twenty metres across, but time and agricultural use have reduced it to something that might easily be mistaken for an ordinary field irregularity.

The structure is subrectangular rather than perfectly circular, with a low mound at its centre measuring about nine metres by five metres. Around it runs a slight but continuous fosse, the shallow ditch that once defined the sacred or ceremonial boundary of the site, and beyond that an outer bank that survives best along the eastern and south-eastern arc, where it reaches 1.3 metres in height partly because it merges with the natural slope of the ground. A large limestone boulder, 1.7 metres long, sits on the south-western line of the bank, and a gap of just over six metres at the same south-western point may represent the monument's original entrance. Two Ordnance Survey maps, the six-inch editions of 1840 and 1916, both recorded the site with hachure marks, the small radiating lines used by cartographers to indicate earthen mounds, which means the feature was legible in the landscape at least that far back. Field drains cut through the barrow at the west and north have done further damage since. Another barrow of the same type sits roughly 800 metres to the west, just visible from the knoll, a reminder that these monuments rarely occur in complete isolation; prehistoric communities often clustered their dead in particular stretches of ground for reasons we can only partially reconstruct.

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