The ring-barrow at Cooksborough in County Westmeath does the opposite. It sits in low-lying ground beside a stream, in a location that, within living memory, was periodically flooded. The mound itself would have stood beneath water. Whether this was incidental or deliberate is an open question, but the evidence suggests the latter.

A ring-barrow is a burial monument of prehistoric date, typically consisting of a central earthen mound enclosed by a circular ditch and an outer bank. The Cooksborough example is small but largely well-preserved, and was unrecorded before its survey in 2015. It measures roughly 16 metres north to south, with the central mound rising steeply to a flattish top only about four metres across. The overall shape is not quite circular; the north-east side lacks a visible ditch and the bank there flattens and straightens for around eight metres, giving the whole monument an approximate D-shape. This straight edge follows a low natural scarp that seems to mark the old boundary between drier ground and the former marsh adjoining the stream. Several large limestone boulders are scattered across the upper surface of the mound and at its base, some bearing solution hollows formed by centuries of water dissolving the stone. The monument is part of a small funerary landscape: a cemetery of five barrows spread across three townlands, including a second ring-barrow just 65 metres to the north-east across the stream in Cloghanumera townland, and a mound-barrow visible on a nearby hillock roughly 90 metres to the south-south-east. Two further mound barrows that once stood across the stream to the north-east have since been destroyed. Surveyor David McGuinness noted that, despite plenty of elevated ground in the surrounding area, the two ring-barrows in this group were deliberately placed in the lowest, wettest part of the landscape, a choice that sets them apart from the more conventionally sited mounds nearby.