Mound, Dunkellin, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Mound, Dunkellin, Co. Galway

In the rolling pastureland near Dunkellin in County Galway, a low earthen mound sits on a gentle rise, easy to miss and, by the early 1980s, easier still to lose entirely beneath a heap of field-clearance rubble.

That last detail is perhaps the most telling thing about it: a prehistoric burial monument, built to mark a life or a community, slowly absorbed back into the agricultural routine of the land it once overlooked.

A barrow is, in its simplest form, a mounded earthen grave, sometimes covering a burial chamber, sometimes simply a cairn of memory. This particular example was catalogued by McCaffrey in 1952 and classed as a "simple, round, flat-topped" barrow, with measurements recorded as roughly 28 feet by 26 feet across and just 3 feet high, or approximately 8.5 metres by 7.9 metres with a height of around 0.9 metres. McCaffrey noted that it was slightly elliptical rather than perfectly circular, and that a number of large boulders were embedded in the mound, concentrated particularly around its base. These stones may have formed a kerb or revetment, a structural edging that would have defined the mound's perimeter and helped retain its shape over centuries. When the site was inspected again in December 1982, the mound itself had been obscured by rubble dumped during the clearing of surrounding fields, a commonplace fate for low earthworks in working farmland.

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Pete F
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