Mound, Eochaill, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Mound, Eochaill, Co. Galway

At the northern edge of Baile na mBocht in Eochaill, County Galway, two earthen mounds sit quietly in a field, their origins unresolved and their purpose unrecorded.

What makes them quietly odd is not just their presence but the discrepancy in the counting: a nineteenth-century observer noted three mounds here, yet only two can now be located, and those two may not even be the ones he described.

When the geologist G. H. Kinahan passed through in 1869, he recorded a group of three mounds at this spot. Later fieldwork found just two. The westernmost is crescentic in plan, a crescent-shaped form opening to the south, measuring roughly 12 metres east to west and just over 15 metres north to south, rising to about 1.4 metres. Three metres to its east sits a second mound, smaller and oval, approximately 8 metres by 10 metres and 1.1 metres high. Tim Robinson's detailed map of the area, produced in 1980, also marks two mounds, though whether these are the same two recorded in the later survey is uncertain. A third mound, if it ever existed as a distinct feature, has either been absorbed into the landscape, destroyed, or perhaps was never quite what Kinahan took it to be. Earthen mounds of this kind in the west of Ireland can represent a range of things, from prehistoric burial monuments to later field clearance heaps, and without excavation there is no way to say which category these fall into.

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