Barrow, Drumraney, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Barrows

Barrow, Drumraney, Co. Westmeath

On a hilltop in Drumraney, County Westmeath, there sits a small mound of earth and stones that nobody can quite agree on.

Roughly eighteen metres across, irregular in shape, and partially quarried away on its southern side, it occupies an elevated position with a clear view of the surrounding landscape. What makes it genuinely peculiar is that its identity remains unresolved: it may be an ancient funerary monument, or it may owe its present form largely to the activities of nineteenth-century surveyors.

The mound does not appear marked as an antiquity on the 1837 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, which is itself telling. What that map does record is that this hilltop served as the ordnance datum point for 401 feet, and it has been suggested that the Ordnance Survey may have modified, or even constructed, the earthwork when establishing that benchmark. The quarrying that has eaten into the mound's southern face complicates matters further, as it has significantly altered the original profile. Earlier assessments leaned towards classifying it as a bowl-barrow, the most common type of Bronze Age burial mound in Ireland, typically a rounded heap of earth or stones raised over a burial. In profile, however, the mound appears more consistent with a stepped-barrow, a form distinguished by one or more terraced levels rising to a flattened top. Whether any of that profile reflects genuine prehistoric construction or is simply the result of later interference remains an open question. A companion earthwork sits about 110 metres to the south, and together the two features give the hilltop an ambiguous, layered quality that resists easy interpretation.

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Pete F
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