Mound, Carrigeen, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Ritual/Ceremonial
On a steep east-facing slope at the south-eastern end of a small ridge in County Kilkenny, three low mounds sit inside a larger enclosure, their origins genuinely unknown.
The most prominent of the three is roughly circular, about seven metres across and no more than half a metre high, with a large sycamore growing from its crown. Two further oval mounds lie just a few metres to the south and south-east. The whole grouping occupies the western quarter of the enclosure, and the surrounding landscape, mostly reclaimed grassland rolling away in every direction, gives the site unusually open views.
What the mounds actually represent depends on a question that remains unresolved: what is the enclosure itself? If it is a ringfort, the type of enclosed farmstead built across Ireland during the early medieval period, then the mounds are probably not archaeological in any significant sense and may simply be the result of natural accumulation or agricultural activity. If the enclosure turns out to be prehistoric in date, the picture changes, and the mounds become possible barrows, the burial mounds used across Atlantic Europe from the Neolithic through the Bronze Age. Writing in 1905, a historian named Carrigan offered a more vivid interpretation, describing the main mound as "probably the remains of an earthen citadel" worn down by centuries of cattle grazing. It is a colourful reading, and the more cautious language of later scholarship would not quite support it, but it captures something of the strangeness of the place: a feature that has clearly been noticed and puzzled over for a long time, without ever yielding a firm answer.