Mound, Ballymacthomas, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Ritual/Ceremonial
In a slightly marshy field beside a tributary of the River Lee in County Kerry, a quiet cluster of earthworks has managed to survive, in partial form, what generations of agricultural improvement could not quite finish off.
The complex includes earthen enclosures, small mounds, a linear earthwork, and a possible barrow, the last being a burial mound type common in prehistoric Ireland, sometimes constructed with double banks. All of them are partially denuded, worn down by reclamation efforts that never fully succeeded in draining the land to usable pasture.
The mound described here sits immediately west of a neighbouring tumulus, and the two form a loose pair in this gently west-sloping ground. It is sub-circular in plan, measuring roughly 13 metres north to south and 11.5 metres east to west, and rises to about one metre in height. No stones were detected in its make-up, suggesting a construction of earth alone rather than the stone-cored mounds found elsewhere in the Irish archaeological record. A survey of the Lee Valley area carried out by Michael Connolly in 1996 and 1997 documented the complex in its current, reduced state, capturing a landscape of overlapping earthworks that had been gradually softened by time, water, and the repeated efforts of farmers working against the soil's natural inclination to stay wet.