Barrow (Ring Barrow), Wattstown, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Barrows
On the north-western slope of Frewin Hill in County Westmeath, a ring-barrow sits in a field with something unusual attached to it.
A ring-barrow is a prehistoric funerary monument, essentially a low central mound or platform encircled by a ditch and an outer earthen bank, and this one would be quietly unremarkable on its own. What sets it apart is an elaborate semicircular earthwork that curves away from its north-eastern side, sweeping around a neighbouring bowl-barrow in the adjacent field and connecting the two monuments in a configuration that, seen from the air, resembles the profile of an Iron Age brooch.
The ring-barrow itself measures roughly 32 metres across and centres on a low flat platform about 17.6 metres in diameter, surrounded by a broad flat-bottomed ditch and an outer bank. Surveyors noted it as far back as 1978 and 1979, when fieldwork recorded the ditch disturbed on the eastern side, cultivation ridges on the southern and western slopes partly levelling the outer bank, and panoramic views opening out to the north and west. A detailed survey carried out by David McGuinness in 2012 greatly expanded on these early observations. He established that the eastern face of the central platform appears to have been deliberately shaved flat, and that this alteration is directly related to the semicircular earthwork adjoining the north-east. That earthwork, a low V-shaped ditch some seven to seven and a half metres wide, cuts through the outer bank of the ring-barrow and runs for approximately 75 metres, curving around the bowl-barrow, which stands just 27 metres to the north-east. McGuinness judged that the connecting earthwork either formed part of the original design of the site or was added later in a way that required significant remodelling of the ring-barrow itself. Whether the two monuments were conceived together or gradually drawn into relationship, the result is a compound landscape feature of a kind rarely documented with this degree of precision.
The site sits on sloping ground below the summit of Frewin Hill, with the western side of the monument described as heavily overgrown at the time of the 2012 survey. Old cultivation ridges running east to west up the hillside have eroded parts of the outer bank on the south and west, leaving the north-north-east as the best-preserved section, where the bank still rises to around 1.3 metres above the base of the ditch.