Barrow (Ring Barrow), Castletownroche, Co. Cork

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Barrow (Ring Barrow), Castletownroche, Co. Cork

In a field near Castletownroche in north Cork, a Bronze Age burial monument has all but disappeared into the grass.

What survives is a barely perceptible rise in the pasture, the last trace of a ring barrow, a type of funerary mound in which a central raised area was encircled by a ditch, or fosse, and sometimes an outer bank. In their intact form these monuments could be imposing features in the landscape; this one, roughly sixteen metres across at its widest, would once have been clearly visible as a circular earthwork.

A 1935 Ordnance Survey six-inch map still showed the site as a hachured circular raised area, the cartographic convention used to indicate a mound with relief. At that point the fosse was recorded as running from the south-south-east around to the north, with the eastern side already cut into by a field boundary. At some point after that survey the mound was levelled, most likely through agricultural activity, leaving only the faint swelling in the ground that remains today. Ring barrows are generally associated with the Bronze Age, and while nothing in the available record identifies who was buried here or when precisely the monument was constructed, the form itself places it within a funerary tradition stretching back several thousand years across Ireland and Britain.

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