Barrow (Ring Barrow), Rahasane, Co. Galway

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Barrow (Ring Barrow), Rahasane, Co. Galway

In a field of reclaimed pastureland near Rahasane, a prehistoric burial monument has effectively ceased to exist above ground, yet it remains recorded, mapped, and known.

The absence itself is the point: what was once a ring-barrow, a circular funerary mound of the kind built during the Bronze Age, has been worn down to nothing visible, erased by centuries of farming and drainage work on land that was once bog or wetland before it was brought into agricultural use.

When McCaffrey surveyed and documented the site in 1952 and again in 1955, enough still remained to take measurements and describe the form. The barrow was roughly 23 metres across in total, with a low, flat-topped central mound about 14 metres in diameter and only 0.3 metres high, encircled by a fosse (a shallow ditch) and an external bank. That form, a mound ringed by a ditch and outer bank, is characteristic of ring-barrows found across Ireland and Britain, typically associated with burial and ritual activity in later prehistory. Even by the time of McCaffrey's visits, the monument was in poor condition. Furze had overgrown it, cultivation ridges from past tillage ran directly across the mound, and pits had been dug into its southern and western sectors. An old field ditch cut across the southern edge, further disturbing what remained. Since then, no surface trace has survived at all. A second ring-barrow lies approximately 24 metres to the south, suggesting this was once a small cluster of monuments rather than an isolated burial site.

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