Barrow (Ring Barrow), Teergonean, Co. Clare

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Barrows

Barrow (Ring Barrow), Teergonean, Co. Clare

At the top of a gorse-covered rise in County Clare, a Bronze Age burial mound sits quietly in pasture, its flat-topped profile still clear against the sky after several thousand years.

What makes it worth a second look is the precision of its surviving geometry: a circular ring-barrow, a type of prehistoric funerary monument consisting of a central mound enclosed by a surrounding ditch and outer earthen bank, that has held its shape with unusual distinctness. The central mound runs about 14 metres across at its base, narrows slightly towards its flat top, and reaches something between one and one and a half metres in height, with steep sides that suggest relatively little erosion. Around it, a shallow flat-bottomed fosse, or ditch, roughly one and a half to two metres wide, separates the mound from a low rounded outer bank.

The monument measures 24 metres in diameter overall, and while those figures are modest enough in isolation, they acquire more weight when considered alongside the landscape position. The spur faces west, and the views from it are wide, which may or may not have been incidental to whoever chose this ground. The ring-barrow appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of both 1842 and 1920, marked with hachures, the short radiating lines surveyors used to indicate rising ground, which means it was legible and recognised as a feature of note well before modern archaeological recording. About 25 metres to the south-east of the mound, a small upright stone slab stands loose in the ground, roughly a metre high and only about 20 centimetres wide. Its relationship to the barrow is not recorded, and it may be incidental, but its proximity gives it a quiet ambiguity that is difficult to entirely dismiss.

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