Mound, Carrigeen, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Ritual/Ceremonial
Three low earthen mounds sit clustered together in the western part of an enclosure on a steep east-facing slope in Carrigeen, Co. Kilkenny, and nobody is quite sure what they are.
That uncertainty is not evasion; it reflects a genuine archaeological puzzle. The mounds may be prehistoric burial mounds, or barrows, raised over the dead in a landscape that was already old when history began. Or they may be nothing of the sort, later features incidental to a more recent enclosure, and therefore of no great antiquity at all. The answer depends almost entirely on what the surrounding enclosure turns out to be, and that question remains open.
The largest of the three mounds is oval in shape, measuring roughly ten metres north to south and seven metres east to west, and rising to about 1.2 metres in height. Its two companions lie within six metres to the northwest and west. Writing in 1905, a historian named Carrigan looked at the site and described what he saw as the probable remains of an earthen citadel, worn almost flat by centuries of cattle tramping across it. It is a vivid image, if a somewhat imaginative one. The enclosure within which all three mounds sit is the critical context here. If it is a ringfort, the type of roughly circular enclosed farmstead common across early medieval Ireland, then the mounds are probably not ancient burial features at all. If the enclosure is prehistoric, however, then a barrow interpretation becomes genuinely plausible. The site commands very good views across a broad expanse of rolling, largely reclaimed grassland, which is itself consistent with the kinds of elevated, prominent positions often favoured for prehistoric monuments. The mounds are heavily overgrown with scrub, and the date and function of all three remains, for now, unknown.