Barrow, Toor, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Barrows
A low earthwork sitting in wet, rush-filled pasture in County Tipperary is not, at first glance, an obvious place to linger.
But the site at Toor rewards attention: it is not a single burial monument but a compound of several, enclosed within a roughly circular area measuring about 21 metres north to south and 22 metres east to west, and defined by a scarp, a low bank-like edge dropping nearly a metre in height. The whole arrangement has a quiet formality that suggests deliberate, considered construction rather than anything accidental.
The enclosure is entered by a causewayed gap on the south-south-east, a break roughly four metres wide left deliberately in the surrounding fosse. A fosse, in this context, is simply a ditch cut into the ground to define and demarcate a space; here it runs from south to north and around through the east and south-east, and is most clearly legible on the south-west to north-west arc. Within this bounded interior, the north-west sector holds two ring-barrows, prehistoric burial mounds each encircled by their own ditch, while the eastern sector contains a ditch-barrow, a related but distinct form in which the mound itself is defined primarily by its surrounding ditch rather than a prominent raised heap of earth. The Shroughnagowneen stream runs immediately to the south, and a further mound lies roughly 275 metres to the north-north-east, suggesting this corner of Tipperary was, at some point in prehistory, a landscape given over in some purposeful way to the dead. The clustering of multiple monuments within a single enclosure is relatively unusual and implies that the site accumulated meaning over time, or that a community deliberately grouped its burial places together rather than scattering them across the land.