Barrow - mound barrow, Fore, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Barrows
On the north-north-western slope of Knockmonaster Hill in County Westmeath, a low earthen mound sits quietly above one of the most layered historical landscapes in Ireland.
It is small, barely a metre high at its tallest point, and irregular in plan, its south-western edge flattened where an old track appears to have clipped it over time. An overgrown boulder is embedded into the mound where the upper surface meets its steeper southern side. Easy to overlook, it is the kind of feature that rewards anyone who already knows what they are looking at.
A mound barrow is, in essence, a burial monument, typically prehistoric in origin, formed by heaping earth or stone over the remains of the dead. This particular example, measured by David McGuinness in 2019, runs roughly 7.8 metres north to south and 7.5 metres east to west, with a slightly domed profile and a flattish top surface of around 4 metres by 3 metres. Its height varies considerably around its circumference, from 0.33 metres on the south side to 1.32 metres on the north, reflecting both its sloping ground and centuries of alteration. Some 2.5 metres to its east runs a broad low bank, apparently cut through by old cultivation ridges, which may have been either a trackway or a field boundary heading downhill towards a motte and bailey to the north-east. A motte and bailey is a Norman fortification type consisting of a raised earthen mound paired with an enclosed courtyard, and that neighbouring feature was itself once misidentified as a barrow. A possible pond-barrow, a type of monument defined by a central hollow rather than a raised mound, lies 54 metres to the south-east on the hill's summit, and a natural dead-ice hollow, a depression left by a block of glacial ice that melted in place after the last ice age, sits about 34 metres to the south. The hill itself is enclosed at its base by a ditch and rampart.
What makes the position of this mound so quietly compelling is the company it keeps. Below it to the north lies the 12th-century Benedictine priory of Fore, and a short distance further south are the remains of St Feichin's early medieval monastery, a site of considerable significance in Irish ecclesiastical history. The mound, if it is indeed a prehistoric barrow, would predate all of this by centuries or millennia, yet it occupies the same hill that generations of monks and medieval townspeople would have looked up at every day. Whether those later communities were aware of it as something ancient and meaningful, or simply walked past it without a second thought, is not something the ground can answer.