Barrow, Ballynagittagh, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Barrows

Barrow, Ballynagittagh, Co. Galway

The most telling feature of this ancient burial mound in Ballynagittagh is not the mound itself but the hollow at its centre.

That deep, cone-shaped depression is a classic sign of robbing, the point where someone, at some unknown point in the past, dug down looking for whatever the mound was built to contain. The monument has survived well enough otherwise, sitting quietly in undulating grassland, its circular grassed-over stony form stretching about sixteen metres across and rising to roughly a metre in height.

A barrow is a prehistoric funerary mound, typically raised over a burial or series of burials, and examples like this one are scattered across the Irish landscape in varying states of preservation. This particular example retains a shallow encircling fosse, the ditch dug when the mound was originally constructed, which remains visible along its southern, western, and northern sides. Field walls have been built up against the monument at both its northern and southern edges, meaning the landscape around it has been reorganised and farmed across many centuries while the mound itself persisted, absorbed into the working agricultural pattern of the land rather than cleared away.

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