Burial mound, Cloghala, Co. Kilkenny

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Burial Sites

Burial mound, Cloghala, Co. Kilkenny

There is nothing left to visit at Cloghala in County Kilkenny, and that absence is itself the point.

A burial mound that once rose from the farmland here was partially excavated around 1960, yielding what were presumed to be human bones and a decorated bone spindle whorl, and was subsequently levelled so thoroughly that no trace of it remains visible on satellite imagery today. The spindle whorl, a small disc-shaped weight used to keep a hand spindle turning steadily during thread-making, was decorated, which suggests it was an object of some care and perhaps personal significance when it was placed in the ground.

The mound does not appear on the first Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1893, nor on the revision carried out between 1899 and 1902, which means it either escaped the surveyors' notice or was not considered significant enough to record at the time. What it represented before the 1960 excavation, and how long it had stood unrecognised, is unknown. A separate enclosed site lies roughly 160 metres to the south-west, hinting that this corner of Kilkenny held more structured human activity than the current landscape suggests. The mound itself, whatever its age or origin, is now gone, absorbed back into ground that gives no sign of what was once buried within it.

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Pete F
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