Barrow (Ring Barrow), Rylane, Co. Cork

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Barrows

Barrow (Ring Barrow), Rylane, Co. Cork

A ring barrow that survived intact on Irish Ordnance Survey maps for nearly a century has since been quietly erased from the landscape, leaving only a slight unevenness in a pasture field near Rylane in mid Cork to suggest that anything was ever there.

Ring barrows are low circular burial mounds, typically of Bronze Age date, defined by a central raised platform, an encircling ditch or fosse, and an outer earthen bank. This one measured roughly ten metres in diameter and was clearly visible as a hachured circular feature on the six-inch OS maps of 1842, 1903, and 1938. At some point in the early 1960s it was levelled, a loss attributed to the University College Cork record of the site.

What makes it more than a footnote is its documented form and its close relationship to a near neighbour. P. J. Hartnett, writing in 1939, described the monument as a circular raised platform enclosed by a fosse with an external earthen bank, with a causewayed entrance, meaning a gap left in the ditch to allow access, oriented to the east. Hartnett noted that it was of similar dimensions to another ring barrow located only about five metres to the north, the two monuments sitting in close proximity in what may have been a small funerary or ceremonial grouping. That second barrow carries the site code CO061-006001- and presumably survives in some form, since it is recorded separately.

For anyone walking the area today, the ground in the vicinity of the levelled barrow is described as uneven, which is often the most a demolished earthwork leaves behind. The pair of monuments, set so close together, would once have made a distinctive feature of this gentle mid-Cork pastureland.

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