Barrow - mound barrow, Irishtown, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Barrows
At Irishtown in County Westmeath, a tall conical mound rises from a low natural eminence in a landscape shaped not by human hands but by glaciers.
The terrain around it is what geologists call a kame and kettle-hole landscape, formed from debris left by retreating ice sheets, and a kettle-hole lake, a hollow created when a buried chunk of glacial ice melted away, sits close by to the north-east. The mound itself is steep-sided and roughly oval in plan, measuring about 16.5 metres north to south and 18 metres east to west. Its height shifts depending on where you stand; the ground falls away sharply to the south-east, making it genuinely difficult to tell where the ancient mound ends and the natural slope begins.
When David McGuinness surveyed the site in 2012, he noted that the mound, a type of prehistoric burial monument known as a tumulus, appears to have originally had a rounded or very slightly flattened top. That top has since been disturbed, most probably by treasure-hunters at some unrecorded point in the past, leaving a rough excavation roughly 1.5 metres by 1.2 metres and about 35 centimetres deep. What they were looking for, or whether they found it, is unknown. The mound is composed of very stony earth, as erosion caused by cattle around its edges makes plain. A series of ledges and steps encircle parts of the mound, and while stepped profiles on some barrows are thought to be deliberate original features, the irregular, discontinuous character of these particular ledges, together with the smooth, well-preserved profile on the south-south-west side, points more to centuries of cattle climbing the mound or to gradual soil movement down its slopes. An old, overgrown quarry lies just to the north. To the north-east, the mound at Colleen More is just visible on the horizon, and the hill of Knockdrin rises prominently to the east-north-east, suggesting this mound once sat within a wider, meaningful prehistoric landscape whose connections are now largely lost to view.