Barrow (Ring Barrow), Palmerstown, Co. Galway

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Barrow (Ring Barrow), Palmerstown, Co. Galway

On a gentle south-facing slope in Palmerstown, County Galway, a low circular earthwork sits quietly in the landscape, its form worn but legible to anyone who knows what to look for.

It is a ring barrow, a type of prehistoric funerary monument typically consisting of a central burial area enclosed by a circular ditch and an outer bank, and this one retains enough of its original shape to suggest the essential geometry has survived several thousand years of agricultural pressure.

The monument measures fifteen metres in diameter, with a flat central area of around three metres across. That central space is encircled by a fosse, meaning a cut ditch, and beyond that a broad, low bank runs around the perimeter. At the north-east, a gap six metres wide interrupts the bank; this appears to be the result of field clearance rather than any deliberate original feature, the kind of gradual damage that comes from generations of farmers moving stone and turning soil around the edges of something old. A single set stone remains visible in this disturbed section, a quiet remnant of whatever arrangement once existed there. The site is recorded by Rynne in 1991 and is described as being in fair condition, which in the language of field archaeology tends to mean recognisable but not intact.

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