Barrow (Ring Barrow), Culleen More, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Barrows
A ridge above Lough Owel in County Westmeath goes by the local name of Captain's Hill, and somewhere on its steep crest sits an oval mound of earth and stone that local tradition insists is the burial place of Turgesius, the ninth-century Norse warlord who, according to medieval sources, carved out a dominant position across much of Ireland before being drowned, allegedly on the orders of the High King Máel Sechnaill, around 845 AD.
Whether the grave of a Viking chieftain actually lies here is impossible to say with confidence, but the association has clearly stuck, and it gives an otherwise modest archaeological feature a quietly unsettling reputation.
The mound itself is a ring barrow, a prehistoric burial monument consisting of a low earthen or stone mound enclosed by a surrounding ditch, known as a fosse, sometimes with an outer bank called a counterscarp bank. Here the fosse is wide and shallow, and the counterscarp bank survives in partial form. The mound measures roughly five metres east to west and fifteen metres northwest to southeast, and it sits at the top of the ridge with views west over Lough Owel and northwest toward Church Island, about 600 metres away. A small quarry or gravel pit, probably of post-medieval date, has been cut into the mound's west-southwest face, and a former golf course in the area may have resulted in some additional landscaping around the site, complicating any straightforward reading of the ground.
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