Barrow, Porterstown, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Barrows

Barrow, Porterstown, Co. Westmeath

In a field near Porterstown in County Westmeath, something circular lies just beneath the threshold of official record.

A small ring, roughly nine metres across, shows up on Digital Globe aerial photography but appears on none of the editions of the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, which were first produced in the nineteenth century and revised at intervals well into the twentieth. Whatever left that faint trace on the ground was never considered significant enough, or was simply never noticed, during any of those survey periods.

The feature is catalogued as a possible barrow, meaning a prehistoric burial mound, though in this case the mound itself, if there ever was one, has been reduced to little more than a cropmark or a slight earthwork legible only from the air. Barrows take many forms across Ireland, from modest ring-ditches to more substantial raised mounds, and without excavation it is rarely possible to say with certainty what period a candidate site belongs to, or whether it was ever used for burial at all. What can be said is that the circular form is a persistent one in the Irish archaeological landscape, appearing from the Neolithic through to the early medieval period, and that a nine-metre diameter places this example at the smaller end of the scale. Its absence from the historical mapping record suggests it was not visible as an upstanding monument by the time those surveys were conducted, which in itself points toward considerable antiquity and a long process of erosion or agricultural levelling.

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Pete F
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