Barrow, Bigfurze, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Barrows

Barrow, Bigfurze, Co. Westmeath

In the wet pastureland of Bigfurze in County Westmeath, a small earthen mound sits quietly on a low rise, surrounded by thorn bushes and encircled by a stone wall that appears to have been added long after whoever raised the mound was gone.

The mound itself measures only around eight metres across, yet it carries the structural hallmarks of a barrow, the term for a prehistoric burial monument formed by heaping earth, sometimes over a chamber or cist, as a mark of the dead. What makes this one quietly arresting is the presence of a large shallow depression at its summit, a detail that almost always signals earlier disturbance, and the local tradition, persistent enough to be recorded, that somewhere at or near the site there lies a cave.

That cave, if it exists, may be a souterrain, an underground stone-built passage or chamber associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, often used for storage or refuge. When the Ordnance Survey mapped the area in 1837, the site appeared as a sub-oval enclosure roughly 26 metres north to south and 25.5 metres east to west, defined by a bank and already bisected by a trackway cutting across its north-eastern sector. The mound sits within this broader enclosure, itself surrounded by what appears to be a fosse, a shallow ditch-like feature, on its west and north-west sides. A relatively modern stone wall, built against a low scarp visible from the west, adds a further layer of enclosure, though its relationship to the earlier archaeology is uncertain. Further indentations on the north-east, east, and west sides of the mound suggest the site has been dug into at various points over the centuries. A second possible barrow lies approximately 37 metres to the west, hinting that this corner of Westmeath once held more significance in the landscape than its present condition suggests.

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Pete F
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