Barrow - bowl-barrow, Tuitestown, Co. Westmeath

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Barrows

Barrow – bowl-barrow, Tuitestown, Co. Westmeath

A roughly conical mound sitting on the north-eastern summit of a glacial ridge in County Westmeath turns out, on closer inspection, to be only the most obvious layer of a considerably more complicated prehistoric arrangement.

The mound itself, a bowl-barrow, is the kind of funerary monument raised across Ireland and Britain during the Bronze Age, typically covering a burial or cremation deposit beneath a domed heap of earth or stone. This one measures about 10.4 metres north to south and 8.9 metres east to west, rises up to 1.4 metres on its northern side, and retains traces of a silted-up encircling ditch on its southern and south-eastern edges. What makes it quietly odd is the summit: it appears flat and level despite the fact that the ground beneath it slopes away to the north-east, suggesting deliberate shaping rather than simple accumulation.

The mound sits atop a glacial landform, the kind of ridge left behind by retreating ice sheets, which here runs north-east to south-west with high points at each end and a saddle dipping between them. The overall effect, as surveyor David McGuinness noted in 2014, is of a small steep hill perched on the broad back of a larger one. Around the base of this landform, someone, at some point, defined its entire perimeter with a low bank and an outer ditch, creating a roughly D-shaped enclosure measuring approximately 100 metres by 80 metres. Faint curvilinear earthworks on the south-western summit, about 38 metres from the mound-barrow, hint at one or two further barrows. Additional low banks run obliquely down the ridge's north-western slope, their relationship to the enclosure and to the mound itself remaining unclear, partly because material has been quarried from the ridge over the years for sand or top-dressing, leaving hollows that complicate the picture. Roughly a kilometre to the north-east, across the valley carrying the Royal Canal, a much larger hengiform or barrow-like monument sits on a low hilltop in Ballynaclin townland, suggesting this part of Westmeath was a focus of prehistoric activity across a wider landscape.

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