Mound, Belleek, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Mound, Belleek, Co. Mayo

In the woods along the River Moy in County Mayo, there is a large circular mound whose purpose nobody can say with confidence.

It rises from the ground with a roughly circular summit of between ten and fifteen metres across, and broadly sloping sides that bring its overall diameter to somewhere in the region of fifty to fifty-five metres. That is a considerable presence in the landscape, and yet what it is, exactly, remains unresolved.

The mound sits within Belleek Wood on the western bank of the Moy, on the grounds of the former Belleek Manor estate. It did not appear on the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1837, but by the 1930 edition it was marked as a roughly circular hachured feature, with a site labelled 'Cromlech' immediately to its north. A cromlech, in Irish archaeological usage, typically refers to a megalithic tomb or portal tomb, which would place a structure like that in the Neolithic or Bronze Age. In 1964, the archaeologists de Valéra and Ó Nualláin recorded the mound itself, describing it as a round mound that appeared to be a cairn of large stones. A cairn is simply a deliberate accumulation of stones, often associated with burial or ritual, and the scale here would suggest something of significance. The difficulty is that those large stones are no longer visible. Whether they were removed, buried under later accumulation, or whether the original assessment was mistaken is not known. The nature of the mound, as the archaeological record puts it plainly, remains uncertain.

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