Barrow (Ring Barrow), Lissawully, Co. Sligo

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Barrows

Barrow (Ring Barrow), Lissawully, Co. Sligo

Tucked into an overgrown copse just south of modern housing in Lissawully, County Sligo, a prehistoric burial monument sits largely unnoticed by its neighbours.

The site is a ring barrow, a type of funerary monument common in Ireland during the Bronze Age, typically consisting of a low central mound encircled by a ditch and bank. What makes this one quietly compelling is how intact its basic structure appears to be, despite the dense vegetation that has since closed in around it.

The central raised area measures thirteen metres in diameter and is ringed by a sequence of earthworks: an inner fosse, or ditch, some four metres wide, followed by an earthen bank that retains an internal height of just over a metre. Beyond that, a second outer fosse and an external bank continue to define the site from the south-west around to the north-west, though the vegetation has grown thick enough that the outer bank's full dimensions could not be recorded. The whole arrangement is broken at the east by a causewayed entrance nearly four and a half metres wide, the kind of deliberate gap left to allow access to the enclosed central space, whether for burial rites, ritual activity, or both. The layering of ditch, bank, and counter-bank gives the monument a more complex profile than a simple mound, suggesting considerable effort went into its original construction.

The copse that now shelters the barrow has become something of a natural screen, and the site sits in an odd kind of limbo between past and present, its ancient earthworks literally edged up against the back gardens of contemporary houses. Visitors should expect difficult going underfoot, and the outer dimensions of the monument remain genuinely obscured by growth, which means the full extent of the earthworks is easier to sense than to see clearly.

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Pete F
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