Earthwork, Lissanode, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Earthwork, Lissanode, Co. Westmeath

In a field in Lissanode, County Westmeath, something circular and roughly 25 metres across sits in the earth, holding water where it should not.

It has no file, no formal record, no name beyond the generic. What it might be, and what it once was, remains an open question.

The feature was identified not by a surveyor walking the land but by scrutiny of aerial imagery captured by Digital Globe between 2011 and 2013. On those images, the outline is clear enough: a roughly circular area of poor drainage, suggesting that something beneath the surface is disrupting how water moves through the soil. The working interpretation is that it could be the remnant of a ditch barrow, a funerary monument type defined by a circular ditch surrounding a central mound or burial area. Over centuries, the mound itself often disappears through agriculture or erosion, while the ditch, cut deeper into the subsoil, persists as a ghost in the ground, betraying itself through the waterlogging and differential vegetation growth that aerial photography can reveal. This particular example was noted by Caimin O'Brien and uploaded to record in August 2023, placing it formally in the landscape, if only just.

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Pete F
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