Barrow (Ring Barrow), Rahasane, Co. Galway

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Barrow (Ring Barrow), Rahasane, Co. Galway

There is a prehistoric burial monument in Rahasane, County Galway, that cannot be seen.

Not obscured by vegetation or hidden behind a wall, but genuinely gone, flattened into the surrounding farmland so completely that no visible surface trace survives. That absence is, in its own way, the most telling thing about it.

A ring-barrow is a burial mound, typically from the Bronze Age, in which a central earthen mound is encircled by a shallow ditch, or fosse, and an outer bank. The Rahasane example, documented by McCaffrey in 1952 and again in 1955, was a modest but structurally clear specimen: a low, flat-topped central mound roughly seven metres across and only about thirty centimetres high, with the surrounding fosse and bank bringing the overall diameter to approximately thirteen metres. It sat some twenty-four metres from a second ring-barrow of the same type, the two forming a quiet pair in the landscape. By the time McCaffrey recorded it, cultivation ridges, the kind left by repeated ploughing or lazy-bed farming, had already begun to cross the mound. Whatever remained of the earthwork after that agricultural pressure has since been levelled entirely.

What makes this site worth knowing about is precisely its disappearance. The farmland at Rahasane looks unremarkable, and there is nothing on the ground to suggest that two Bronze Age burial monuments once occupied this corner of south Galway. The pairing of ring-barrows, placed so deliberately close together, suggests this was once a meaningful piece of ground to the people who shaped it. The record of what stood here survives only in a mid-twentieth century description, a set of measurements, and a grid reference pointing to ordinary fields.

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Pete F
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