Barrow - mound barrow, Rathtrim, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Barrows
On the shoulder of a hill in Rathtrim, County Westmeath, sits a small earthen mound that is easy to overlook and difficult to date with any certainty.
It measures roughly six metres across its flattened top and rises only about fifty centimetres from the surrounding ground, a modest presence that nevertheless appears to be entirely man-made. A few bushes have taken root in and around it, softening its outline further, but beneath that untidy vegetation the circular form is still clearly legible.
The mound sits to the south-east of a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead common across early medieval Ireland, and its proximity to that feature hints at a landscape that has been organised and inhabited across several distinct periods. Whether the mound predates the ringfort, postdates it, or was placed in deliberate relation to it is unknown. If it is indeed a burial mound, a mound-barrow is among the older monument types in the Irish countryside, used to mark the graves of the dead, sometimes from as far back as the Bronze Age. The earliest formal description on record dates to 1983, which noted that the mound commands a very good view, a quality that recurs in the siting of prehistoric burial monuments across Ireland. A survey visit in 2013 was unable to gain access to assess it further, so much about this particular mound remains open to question.