Barrow (Ring Barrow), Oran Beg, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Barrows
There is nothing left to see at Oran Beg.
No mound, no earthwork, no depression in the ground. A ring-barrow that held the cremated remains of the dead for roughly two thousand years was quarried out of existence sometime in the early 1980s, and the low-lying pastureland where it once sat gives no indication that anything was ever there at all. That absence is itself a kind of record.
A ring-barrow is a burial monument consisting of a central earthen mound surrounded by a circular ditch, known as a fosse, and an outer bank. The example at Oran Beg measured eleven metres across in total, with the mound itself spanning five and a half metres. It was excavated in 1970 by E. Rynne, who found not one burial but three distinct concentrations of cremated bone: one placed within the central mound, and two others deposited in the fosse, one to the south-west and one to the north-east. The north-eastern deposit was accompanied by fragments of bronze and more than eighty glass beads, objects consistent with an Early Iron Age date, placing the monument's use somewhere in the centuries around and before the beginning of the common era. Glass beads of this period were prestige items, worn as personal ornaments and sometimes placed with the dead, which hints that whoever was buried here held some degree of social standing within their community. Within roughly a decade of those finds being made, the site was gone.