Barrow - mound barrow, Mulliganstown, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Barrows
On a high ridge in Co. Westmeath, running roughly north-east to south-west, there is a low irregular mound that barely rises half a metre above the surrounding ground.
It is barely noticeable, partly eaten away by quarrying on its north-western side, and what little earthwork survives is so degraded that even its basic identity is uncertain. It may be a prehistoric burial mound or barrow, the kind of rounded earthen monument raised over the dead during the Bronze Age, though the evidence is thin enough that another explanation remains on the table.
The 1837 Ordnance Survey Fair Plan map marked the site as a circular enclosure and labelled it a "Fort", while the corresponding six-inch map of the same year showed only a semi-circular enclosure, with its enclosing element running from south around to west and north. At the centre of that enclosure, the mapmakers recorded an Ordnance Datum height of 361 feet, and this detail introduces a genuine ambiguity. It is possible that the earthwork visible today is not a monument in the archaeological sense at all, but rather a benchmark feature, a small constructed rise put in place by the Ordnance Survey to mark a measured elevation point. After 1837, the site disappeared from subsequent editions of the six-inch maps entirely, which suggests either that later surveyors considered it unremarkable or that the feature had already begun to lose its definition. A poorly preserved north-south earthen bank at the western end of the rise is thought to represent nothing more ancient than an old field boundary. What remains is a low mound with a short bank extending southward from its base, four to five metres long, sitting on a ridge with open views in every direction, and a question about what it ever actually was.