Boundary mound, Cuilbalkeen, Co. Roscommon
There is a mound marked on a map in County Roscommon that, in all likelihood, no longer exists above the surface of the earth, and possibly never amounted to much to begin with.
It appears on the 1914 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, plotted somewhere out on the blanket bog of Cuilbalkeen, sitting on raised bog, which is the kind of waterlogged, slowly accumulating peatland that tends to swallow small earthworks quietly and without ceremony.
The mound was almost certainly a boundary marker erected by the Ordnance Survey itself during one of its mapping campaigns, a practical, workaday feature placed in the landscape to establish a fixed point of reference rather than to commemorate anything ancient or ceremonial. Such markers were a routine part of the surveying process, and they were often modest constructions, vulnerable to the gradual encroachment of bog vegetation and peat growth. By the time anyone thought to record it formally, the feature had already disappeared from view entirely. It is not visible on the ground today.