Barrow (Ring Barrow), Lisduff, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Barrows
At Lisduff in County Tipperary, a ring barrow sits quietly within a larger enclosure, its outlines so subtle that a casual walker might cross them without noticing anything at all.
A ring barrow is a prehistoric funerary monument, typically Bronze Age, consisting of a low earthen bank and a surrounding ditch that once defined a sacred or burial space. Here, both elements survive, though barely.
The monument occupies the western edge of a scarp within an enclosure recorded separately. It is sub-circular in plan, measuring roughly 5.25 metres north to south and 7 metres east to west. A shallow fosse, the ditch element of the ring, runs around it, about two metres wide and only fifteen centimetres deep. The bank that completes the circuit is similarly modest, standing no more than fifteen centimetres above the interior ground level on its inner face and ten centimetres on the outer. That bank is traceable from the north-west around through north, east, south, and south-west, but the remaining arc, from south-west around through west to north-west, has been disturbed, most likely by cattle moving along the scarp edge of the main enclosure over many generations. The effect of that erosion is that the monument now reads as a partial ring, its southern and eastern portions still legible in the ground while the western side has been worn down into the slope.