Bullring, Skeagh More, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Market Places
On the summit of Skeagh Hill in County Westmeath, a ring of trees traces a near-perfect circle roughly 84 metres across, enclosing about one and a half acres of ground.
At its centre sits a low, flat-topped mound whose origins nobody has been able to settle with any confidence. Is it a prehistoric burial mound, a natural rock outcrop, or something built by the Ordnance Survey in the nineteenth century to anchor a triangulation station? The question remains open, and that ambiguity is part of what makes the place quietly compelling.
The circular earthwork was already being called the Bull Ring by the time the Ordnance Survey recorded it on its 1837 six-inch map, and the name appears again in the OS Fair Plan map and the OS Name Book of the same period. A bull ring, in this context, likely refers to a post-1700 enclosure used for the baiting or management of bulls, a practice associated with rural fairs and markets in Ireland before such activities were suppressed in the nineteenth century. By the time the revised 25-inch map was published in 1913, a low mound at the centre, by then serving as an OS trigonometrical station, had been added to the cartographic record. A 1971 description noted rock visible in the sides of the mound and a very low, sub-triangular platform on top, features that could point equally toward a natural geological formation or a constructed earthwork. Aerial photographs taken in July 1966 show the central mound clearly within its circular setting, and more recent satellite imagery confirms both features are still visible.
The hill offers extensive views in all directions, which would have made it a practical choice both for prehistoric activity, if the mound does turn out to have burial origins, and for the Ordnance Survey's triangulation network, which depended on intervisibility between elevated points across the landscape. The tree-ring that now outlines the enclosure gives the site a distinctive appearance from above, a legible circle on the hilltop that hints at a long sequence of use, even if the precise nature of each layer remains uncertain.