Barrow (Ring Barrow), Togher, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Barrows

Barrow (Ring Barrow), Togher, Co. Tipperary

At Togher in County Tipperary, a prehistoric burial monument sits on a low natural hillock, its circular earthworks still clearly legible in the landscape after several thousand years.

This is a ring barrow, a funerary monument type built during the Bronze Age, in which a central mound or raised area is encircled by a ditch and an outer bank, together forming a kind of layered boundary around the burial space at the centre. What makes this example worth pausing over is the quality of its survival and the deliberate way its builders worked with the natural terrain, scarping, that is, cutting away, the base of the existing hillock to sharpen its edges and integrate the landform into the monument's design.

The raised central area measures some 29 metres east to west, enclosed by a fosse, or ditch, that runs between three and six metres wide and reaches an external depth of around a metre. Outside that sits an earthen bank roughly 2.2 metres wide and up to 0.9 metres high on its outer face. At the south-east, there appears to be a causewayed entrance, a deliberate gap in the fosse approximately five metres across, suggesting the monument was designed with a specific point of access or ceremonial approach in mind. To the north-west, the natural hillock extends beyond the monument proper, its base also scarped, indicating the builders shaped the broader landform as well as the immediate monument. A modern trackway now cuts across the hillock to the west of the barrow, a small intrusion that does little to diminish the coherence of what remains. Immediately to the north, poorly drained bogland completes the setting, the kind of marginal, waterlogged ground that frequently borders prehistoric monuments of this type across Ireland.

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