Mound, Loughrask, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Mound, Loughrask, Co. Clare

In a meadow in County Clare, close to the shore of Lough Rask, sits a low earthen mound that managed to escape the attention of the Ordnance Survey's first major mapping effort in 1842.

It only appeared on the revised six-inch edition of 1915, rendered in hachures, the cartographic shorthand used to suggest raised ground, which gives some sense of how subtle and easy to overlook this feature really is. Roughly circular in plan, it measures just over four and a half metres across its surface and rises to a maximum height of about 1.3 to 1.4 metres at its eastern and southern sides, sitting at the northeast end of a gentle ridge before the ground slopes away towards the lake some 200 metres distant.

The mound carries a classification of 'Earthwork', a deliberately broad category that reflects genuine uncertainty about its origins and purpose. Earthen mounds of this general type in Ireland could represent anything from prehistoric burial monuments to later medieval features associated with land management or local lordship, and without excavation it is rarely possible to say which. What can be observed on the surface offers a few small details worth noting: there is evidence of possible revetting, meaning the deliberate reinforcement of the mound's outer base with stone or some structural material, along the northern edge. Field clearance stones, the kind of loose rock gathered by farmers when preparing ground for cultivation, have been deposited at the base and partway up the sides, which can obscure earlier features but also suggests the mound has sat in agricultural land for long enough to accumulate generations of casual tipping. The precise relationship between those deposited stones and any original construction is not clear from surface inspection alone.

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