Barrow (Ring Barrow), Ballinlough, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Barrows
On the fairways of a Westmeath golf course, a prehistoric burial mound sits overgrown and largely unnoticed by those playing past it.
What makes this particular ring barrow quietly peculiar is not its age or even its survival, but the fact that a later earthen bank cuts clean through it from east to west, slicing the monument in two and leaving the northern half of the central platform noticeably higher than the southern half, a difference of around half a metre. A ring barrow is a burial mound of the Bronze Age type, typically consisting of a raised central mound enclosed by a circular ditch and an outer bank. Here the overall structure spans roughly thirty metres across, with the central mound or platform measuring just over twenty metres at its widest. The intruding bank and its accompanying shallow ditch are a separate, later feature entirely, and in places they read less like a formal earthwork than a scarp or a sunken trackway, especially where the ditch extends beyond the barrow to east and west and shows up on aerial photographs as a line of dense hedgerow.
The monument was surveyed in 2015 by David McGuinness, who noted it as fairly well preserved despite being densely overgrown. It sits on a broad, low north-to-south ridge that falls away more sharply on the eastern side than the western, within a golf course developed on the former demesne land of the Nugents of Ballinlough Castle. The Nugents were a significant landed family in County Westmeath, and the demesne landscape they shaped over the centuries has since been repurposed, though the prehistoric earthwork at its edge predates all of that by several millennia. The flat upper surface of the mound slopes gently from south to north, and the outer bank reaches nearly four metres in width at the north-west, rising almost a metre above the ditch beside it. There is no clear evidence that the mound itself was disturbed or rebuilt, beyond the intrusion of that later east-west bank, which remains unexplained.