Mound, Barnacashel, Co. Wicklow

Co. Wicklow |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Mound, Barnacashel, Co. Wicklow

On a gentle west-facing slope in Barnacashel, County Wicklow, there sits a circular mound that the surrounding landscape has done its quiet best to obscure.

Roughly eleven metres across and rising to about one and a half metres in height, it is built from both earth and stone, and what may once have been a kerb, the ring of upright or closely set stones that typically defines the outer edge of a prehistoric burial mound, is still faintly detectable along its western side. Field boulders, gathered and deposited over generations of agricultural clearance, have largely swallowed that edge, leaving the structure in a state of comfortable ambiguity.

Mounds of this type, broadly classed as burial cairns or funerary mounds, are found across Ireland and generally date to the Bronze Age or earlier, raised over the remains of the dead and sometimes containing cremated bone, pottery, or small personal objects. The presence of a kerb, even a possible one, places this example within a tradition of carefully constructed monuments rather than accidental earthworks. A short distance to the north, roughly two hundred metres away, several clearance cairns have been noted, though these appear to be of recent origin, the result of farmers piling field stones rather than any ancient ritual activity. The proximity of the two is a small lesson in how the Irish landscape layers the genuinely ancient alongside the entirely mundane.

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Pete F
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