Mound, Slieve, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Ritual/Ceremonial
On the slopes of Slieve, in the far west of the Dingle Peninsula, there is nothing left to see.
That absence is, in its own way, the point. An earthen mound once stood here, modest in scale but unmistakably deliberate, measuring roughly six metres by one and a half metres at its base and rising to somewhere between one and three metres in height. At some point around fifteen years before it was formally recorded, it was levelled, removed from the landscape as quietly as it had presumably sat within it.
The mound was documented by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula, a meticulous regional catalogue that gathered evidence of prehistoric and early historic remains across one of the most archaeologically dense stretches of the Irish coastline. Earthen mounds of this kind can serve many purposes across Irish prehistory and early history, from burial monuments to boundary markers to platforms for structures, though without excavation it is rarely possible to say which function any particular example served. What can be said is that this one is gone, its dimensions preserved only in a survey entry and local memory rather than in the ground itself.