Barrow, Ferganstown And Ballymacon, Co. Meath

Co. Meath |

Barrows

Barrow, Ferganstown And Ballymacon, Co. Meath

A low circular mound sitting at the crest of a north-facing slope above the River Boyne survived quietly at Ferganstown and Ballymacon until 1976, when building work erased it.

The mound measured roughly fourteen metres across and stood about a metre high, unremarkable enough from a distance, yet at its centre lay a long cist burial, a form of interment in which the body is enclosed within upright stone slabs forming a rectangular grave. What the builders uncovered was the extended, supine skeleton of a woman, laid east to west with her head positioned to the west, a burial orientation with pre-Christian associations.

The find was recorded by E. P. Kelly of the National Museum of Ireland, and Kelly published his account in the journal Riocht na Midhe in 1977. No artefacts came from the grave itself, though human bone fragments were retrieved from displaced spoil during the clearance. Without datable objects, no precise chronology can be pinned to the burial, but Kelly considered it a likely Iron Age pre-Christian interment. There is a further layer of uncertainty around the site's name and identity. The nineteenth-century antiquarian William Wilde, writing in 1849, mentioned a place called Knock-a-Raymon in this general area, and the mound at Ferganstown may be the same location he had in mind. If so, the site had a local name and some degree of recognition well over a century before it was destroyed. Two later episodes of archaeological monitoring, one during sewage works in 1999 supervised by C. Mullins, and another during water-pipe laying in 2006 overseen by S. Delaney, produced nothing further connected with the burial. The mound itself, and the woman interred within it, now exist only in the record Kelly left behind.

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