Barrow (Ditch barrow), Lakill And Moortown, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Barrows

Barrow (Ditch barrow), Lakill And Moortown, Co. Westmeath

On a level stretch of ground in County Westmeath, seven prehistoric burial mounds sit so close together that two of them are separated by just two metres of earth.

This is a barrow-cemetery, a clustering of individual funerary monuments that points to a landscape once deliberately chosen and repeatedly returned to for burial. Six of the seven barrows retain some visible form above ground; the seventh has vanished entirely, leaving only its recorded coordinates as evidence it ever existed.

The particular monument at the centre of this grouping is a ditch-barrow, a type of prehistoric burial mound defined by a low central platform or mound encircled by a shallow ditch rather than, or in addition to, an outer earthen bank. A 2015 survey by David McGuinness described it as a very low-relief earthwork, its circular central mound measuring roughly 6.4 metres north to south and 6 metres east to west, with an overall diameter including the ditch of around 9 metres. The ditch itself drops only 0.28 metres below the level of the central mound, and barely 0.05 metres below the surrounding ground to the north, making it exceptionally subtle in the landscape. McGuinness noted that any outer bank the monument may once have had could easily have been destroyed by ploughing before the site was first formally recorded in 1981. Faint traces of what may be a third ring-barrow were also observed some 5 metres to the south-west, suggesting the full extent of the cemetery may not yet be fully understood. A drone photograph taken by Peter Nagy subsequently confirmed the presence of this small ditch-barrow immediately to the west of a neighbouring bowl-barrow, the kind of aerial perspective that has repeatedly clarified the relationships between monuments that are almost imperceptible from the ground.

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