Mound, Barreel, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Mound, Barreel, Co. Mayo

A low earthen mound rising from pasture in Barreel, Co. Mayo, managed to escape the attention of the Ordnance Survey entirely.

Despite sitting in open farmland on a narrow north-south ridge, overlooking bog stretching to the north-east, it appears on no edition of the OS six-inch maps, the standard cartographic record for monuments of this kind across Ireland. It only came to light through aerial imagery, which is itself a quiet reminder of how much the Irish landscape still keeps to itself.

The mound is subcircular in plan, roughly 22 to 24 metres across in total, with a relatively flat top platform about 12 metres in diameter. Its sides slope broadly outward, reaching a height of about 1.7 metres on the northern face, where the natural fall of the ridge gives the structure an added steepness. A field wall cuts across the western side, truncating the mound along what is now a property boundary. On the south-south-west, a low bank-like rise, only about 30 centimetres high and surviving for just four metres in length, traces part of the platform edge; no comparable feature exists elsewhere around the top. The northern slope drops to a narrow terrace before falling again by around two metres, giving that side of the mound a distinctly stepped profile. A row of close-set boulders along the terrace edge is a modern addition and should not be mistaken for anything older. What makes the site particularly affecting is a piece of local knowledge attached to it: there was said to be a lisheen, a cillín or informal children's burial ground, at or near the mound. These small, unconsecrated plots, typically used for unbaptised infants and others excluded from formal church burial, were once a common but rarely documented feature of the Irish countryside, and their association with older earthworks was not unusual.

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Pete F
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