Midden, Barrow, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Midden, Barrow, Co. Kerry

In the townland of Barrow in County Kerry, there is a legally protected ancient monument whose exact whereabouts nobody can quite pinpoint.

It is a midden, a prehistoric refuse heap, the kind of site that accumulates over generations as communities discard shells, bones, broken pottery, and the ordinary debris of daily life. Such deposits are archaeologically valuable precisely because they preserve the mundane, offering a record of diet, trade, and domestic habit that more formal monuments rarely provide. The problem, in this case, is that the monument's location has never been satisfactorily fixed.

On 28 February 1992, this midden was one of seven entered onto the Register of Historic Monuments, a process formalised through the Irish state gazette Iris Oifigiúil, under Schedule 1/92. Registration confers legal protection and is a significant designation. Yet when it came to mapping the precise spot, the boundary shown on the registration order was not specific enough to pin down which part of the area the midden actually occupies. As a result, it was assigned a temporary location at the notional centre of the registered zone, a bureaucratic placeholder that has apparently remained in place ever since. The site exists in official records as both protected and, in a practical sense, somewhat lost.

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