Mound, Moorgagagh, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Mound, Moorgagagh, Co. Mayo

A dry-stone field wall cuts straight through the middle of this ancient mound in Moorgagagh, Co. Mayo, as though the boundary were simply more important than whatever lay beneath it.

The wall runs roughly north to south, bisecting what was once a circular earthen and stone mound of around eight metres in diameter, and the result is a site that is half preserved and half uncertain, its story divided as neatly as the land it sits on.

The mound occupies a slight rise in pasture ground, with the land falling away to the south and west. Its eastern half survives in reasonably good condition, forming a compact D-shape, roughly seven to eight metres north to south and about five metres east to west, with a gently domed profile rising to around 0.7 metres. It is covered in long grass and presents a tidy, readable outline. The western half is a different matter. Dense blackthorn has colonised that side of the wall, swallowing the ground in thorned scrub, and while a low rise is just about visible beneath the vegetation, it is difficult to say how much of the mound survives there. It may have been damaged or partly levelled at some point, though the scrub makes proper assessment difficult. Field boundaries in Ireland have a long habit of respecting nothing older than the last landlord's survey, and this mound, wherever it falls in the long chronology of Irish prehistoric earthworks, has been subject to that same indifference.

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Pete F
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