Barrow (Ring Barrow), Toor, Co. Tipperary

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Barrow (Ring Barrow), Toor, Co. Tipperary

In a field at Toor in County Tipperary, a prehistoric burial mound sits slightly off-centre within a larger enclosing earthwork, a small but telling detail that suggests the two structures were planned or at least understood in relation to one another.

A second ring-barrow lies a short distance to the south-west, making this a cluster rather than an isolated monument, the kind of grouping that archaeologists increasingly recognise as deliberate landscaping of the dead across an ancestral territory.

A ring-barrow is one of the simpler forms of prehistoric funerary monument: a low circular mound, or sometimes just a flat area, enclosed by a surrounding ditch and bank. Here the circular interior measures roughly six metres across and sits within a fosse, the term for the encircling ditch, that is about one and a half metres wide and now only fifteen centimetres deep. A low outer bank, barely five centimetres above the exterior ground level on its outer face, runs visibly along the north-east and south-east arcs. In the north quadrant, only a slight scarp, a low edge or step in the ground, survives to mark the interior, and this portion lies about two metres from the outer enclosing monument. The whole interior is grass-covered with a gentle slope facing south. These are modest dimensions and modest surviving heights, the result of centuries of agricultural activity gradually smoothing what were once more pronounced earthen forms.

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