Barrow - bowl-barrow, Ballyalla, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Barrows
On a low glacial hill rising out of coarse marshy pasture in County Clare, a prehistoric burial mound sits quietly on the highest point of the landscape, ringed by a wide outer bank and a flat-bottomed ditch, and almost entirely swallowed by gorse.
The structure is a bowl barrow, a type of funerary monument typical of the Bronze Age, in which a central mound is encircled by a fosse, essentially a surrounding ditch, and often an outer earthen bank beyond it. The overall effect, when the form is visible at all beneath the vegetation, is of a shallow bowl inverted on the hilltop.
This particular barrow sits on the summit of a drumlin, one of those smooth, elongated hills shaped by glacial debris, here among a cluster of similar landforms roughly 125 metres south-east of the Cooleen River. The mound at its centre measures about 8.5 metres across and stands 1.55 metres high. Around it, the fosse is 3 metres wide; beyond that, the outer bank stretches 5.5 metres in width and rises to about 2 metres at its outer edge. The whole monument spans approximately 26 metres in diameter. Whatever commanding presence it may once have had is now expressed mainly through its position: from the drumlin summit, the views open out clearly in every direction, suggesting that visibility, whether of the landscape or from it, mattered to whoever chose this spot. The monument was recorded on Ordnance Survey six-inch maps in both 1840 and 1916, meaning its outline was recognised and marked across nearly a century of cartographic work, even as the surrounding land remained rough grazing.