Barrow, Balrath, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Barrows
In a stretch of wet pasture in County Westmeath, something old is quietly disappearing into the ground.
A roughly oval earthwork, measuring around 25 metres north to south and 18 metres east to west, sits on low-lying land near the townland boundary with Skeagh Beg. It is the kind of monument that rewards patience rather than spectacle: the scarp, a low slope or ridge of earth that once defined the perimeter, is so poorly preserved on its western and south-western side that it is barely traceable at all. A modern field fence has cut across it, a field clearance stone dump obscures much of the eastern edge, and the shallow fosse, the ditch that would once have circled the structure, survives only in faint traces on the northern arc.
What makes the site quietly interesting is not its condition but its apparent invisibility to earlier cartographers. When the Ordnance Survey mapped this area in 1837, nothing was marked at this location. The earthwork only appeared on the revised 25-inch map of 1913, depicted as a small oval feature already being encroached upon by a field boundary. A field survey carried out in 1980 recorded the structure in some detail, noting an uneven interior that rises irregularly toward a long, central mound-like rise, with shallow depressions and loose stones suggesting past disturbance. A narrow causeway on the northern side, roughly 1.8 metres wide and standing about 0.3 metres high, may preserve the line of an original entrance. A barrow is a burial mound, typically of prehistoric date, and the oval form with a central rise is consistent with that tradition, though the accumulated damage makes any precise interpretation difficult.
