Barrow, Balgarrett, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Barrows
In the forestry of Balgarrett, in County Westmeath, a low mound sits in a clearing kept deliberately free of trees, unrecorded on any edition of the Ordnance Survey maps and known almost entirely through aerial photography.
That absence from the maps is itself telling: whatever this small rise in the ground represents, it passed unnoticed by generations of cartographers, surfacing only when satellite imagery made it possible to read the landscape from above.
The mound is thought to be the remains of a barrow, a prehistoric burial monument, typically a rounded earthen heap raised over one or more interments. It lies within a modern forestry plantation and sits roughly 80 metres south-southwest of a confirmed ring-barrow, a related form of monument consisting of a central mound enclosed by a circular ditch and outer bank. The proximity of the two features is suggestive; barrows of this kind were not always isolated monuments but sometimes formed loose groupings across a landscape, possibly reflecting family or community burial traditions extending over long periods of prehistoric use. The trees around the low mound have been set back to create an exclusion zone, mirroring the treatment given to the ring-barrow nearby, which at least signals that those managing the plantation have recognised something worth protecting, even if the feature remains unconfirmed and unmapped.
Because the mound has never appeared on Ordnance Survey maps and is identified only through aerial photography, locating it on the ground would be genuinely difficult without prior knowledge of the area. The exclusion zone within the plantation is the most visible indicator of its presence, a small gap in the uniform rows of conifers where the ground has been left to itself.