Barrow (Ring Barrow), Ballyglass, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Barrows

Barrow (Ring Barrow), Ballyglass, Co. Westmeath

On a prominent ridge in Co. Westmeath, a low earthen mound sits enclosed by a wide, shallow fosse and a surrounding bank, the whole arrangement measuring just under twenty metres across.

What makes the site quietly strange is not the barrow itself but what lies folded into a field boundary a few metres to its east: three large standing stones, upright and purposefully arranged, two set end to end as if forming the side wall of a burial chamber, the third placed perpendicular at the northwest end, suggesting a jamb stone, the kind used to frame the entrance of a megalithic tomb. A ring-barrow, sometimes called a saucer-barrow in British terminology, consists of a central burial mound ringed by a ditch and an outer bank; they are generally associated with the Bronze Age. Finding one so close to what appears to be the partial remains of a megalithic structure, a form more typical of the Neolithic period, gives the site an unusual layered quality, as though two quite different moments in prehistory came to rest on the same stretch of high ground.

The three orthostats, large upright stones of the sort used in megalithic construction, were already noticed and puzzled over by the time fieldworkers examined them in detail during the 1970s. They recorded the barrow mound itself as roughly oval, measuring about seven metres along its northeast to southwest axis and just under six metres across, rising to approximately 1.1 metres in height. By 1921, a local observer named Shaw had noted the stones collectively under the name "leegaun", though he placed them in the wrong position relative to the barrow. The stones had by then been partially absorbed into a later field bank of earth and stone, which accounts for why they survived at all; incorporated into an agricultural boundary, they became invisible in plain sight. The megalithic structure they once formed appears to have been largely levelled, with only these three orthostats remaining to suggest its original form. The ridge on which all of this sits commands wide views in every direction, which would not have been incidental to whoever chose this place.

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