Barrow, Lickeen, Co. Clare

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Barrow, Lickeen, Co. Clare

On a low hillside in County Clare, overlooking Lickeen Lough, sits a small earthen mound that has resisted easy classification for well over a century.

It is listed only as a possible ring-barrow, the qualifier doing a lot of quiet work. A ring-barrow is a burial mound typically enclosed by a surrounding ditch or bank, and the uncertainty here is telling: enough survives to suggest prehistoric funerary intent, but not enough to be certain.

The mound itself is modest in scale, roughly 9.9 metres east to west and 8 metres north to south, built from earth and shale, rising anywhere between a quarter of a metre and one and a half metres depending on where you measure. It sits on the south-facing slope of an oval hillock that is probably natural, near the hilltop, in unreclaimed pasture. It was already being mapped as something noteworthy in 1840, when the Ordnance Survey recorded it on their six-inch series with hachuring, the small radiating lines used to indicate raised earthworks. It appears again on the 1916 revision. At some point, someone dug a hole two metres deep into the centre of the mound, and a curving channel roughly a metre wide was cut into its south-eastern side, apparently to give access to the interior from the nearby road. That road has since clipped the southern edge of the barrow. The central hollow is now overgrown with brambles, and whatever might have been sought, or found, there is no record of it.

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Pete F
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