The ring-barrow in Cloghanumera, County Westmeath, breaks that rule entirely. It sits in low-lying ground beside a stream, in a location the landowner confirms is prone to flooding, when there are perfectly good heights available in every direction. A ring-barrow is a circular burial mound encircled by a ditch and an outer bank, a form of funerary monument associated broadly with the Bronze Age. This one was not recorded at all until a survey in 2015, and its placement seems to have been a deliberate choice rather than an accident of survival.

When surveyor David McGuinness examined the site in 2015, he found it in fairly good condition despite centuries of agricultural activity. The central mound measures roughly nine metres across at its base and rises to a flat top about six metres wide. Around it runs a broad, flat-based ditch, and beyond that an outer bank, though the western portion of the bank has been worn away by livestock erosion. The whole monument is about nineteen metres across from north to south. One detail reveals the care of its original builders: because the ground slopes gently down towards the stream to the south-west, the mound was made higher and more massive on that side to keep its upper surface level. The 1838 First Edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map shows an older field ditch running across the south-eastern edge, which appears to have removed a stretch of the outer bank long before anyone thought to document the monument. There are also faint traces of a possible second outer ditch on the northern side, though these are too indistinct to be mapped with confidence. The stream that runs immediately to the south-west of the barrow may itself have played a role in the original design; unless it has been redirected since antiquity, the outer bank was never complete on that side, suggesting the water was incorporated as a natural boundary rather than worked around. Across that same stream, about sixty-five metres to the west-south-west in the neighbouring townland of Cooksborough, a second ring-barrow sits in equally low-lying ground, and a mound-barrow on a hilltop 120 metres to the south-south-west is visible across the water. Two further mound-barrows once stood on higher ground to the north-east in Killynan townland, though both have since been destroyed. A small natural lake, possibly a kettle-hole formed by glacial activity, lies about fifty metres to the north. The clustering of monuments around this stream, with the burial mounds consistently occupying the wet margins rather than the commanding ridges, points to a deliberate and coherent ritual landscape whose logic is no longer entirely legible to us.