Burial, Bargy Commons, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Burial Sites
On the south-facing slope near the south-western summit of Forth Mountain in County Wexford, close to a landmark known as Skeater Rock, there is a prehistoric burial site that no longer exists in any visible form.
What once stood here was a cairn, a mounded heap of stones used in prehistoric funerary practice to mark and protect a burial, stretching roughly thirty metres across. It was removed in 1884, and with it went any chance of properly recording what lay beneath.
The circumstances of its removal are not unusual for the period. In 1884, the cairn was dismantled entirely, and in the process a bowl food vessel was discovered. These small ceramic vessels, typically associated with Bronze Age burials in Ireland and Britain, are thought to have been placed with the dead as grave goods, possibly containing offerings or symbolic provisions. The find was later noted by Ffrench in 1895, and subsequently referenced by Culleton in 1984. Beyond those brief mentions, little else was recorded. The precise location of the cairn is now unknown, the stones are gone, and whatever burial or burials the mound once covered were disturbed without systematic documentation. It is the kind of erasure that was commonplace in an era before protective legislation, when landowners and labourers might clear ancient monuments without any formal record being made.