Burial mound, Strattonstown, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Burial Sites
At 126 metres above sea level on the summit of a broad ridge in County Westmeath, something once stood that has since been almost entirely erased from the landscape.
The spot is known from a single cartographic annotation, "Stratonstown Moat", recorded on an Ordnance Survey Fair Plan map. By 1980, whoever examined the site found no surface remains at all, and modern aerial photography confirms the absence: the ground gives nothing away.
The word "moat" in older Irish mapping often has nothing to do with water-filled ditches. It is a common anglicisation applied loosely to earthen mounds of various origins, including burial mounds raised in prehistory. The hilltop position here is telling. Elevated ridge-top locations were frequently chosen for prehistoric funerary monuments, placed where they could be seen from a distance and where the dead might, in some sense, oversee the surrounding land. The 1838 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map placed a trigonometric station at the spot, noting its height of 414 feet above ordnance datum, but depicted no monument. The Fair Plan, an earlier working document used during the survey process, carried the "Stratonstown Moat" annotation that subsequent published editions quietly dropped. Whether the mound was already largely gone by the time the surveyors arrived, or simply judged too ambiguous to mark, is not recorded. What is clear is that by the time anyone looked carefully in 1980, the monument had been levelled entirely, most likely through agricultural activity over the preceding century or more.
What remains is a classification built on inference rather than physical evidence: a possible burial mound, identified by its commanding hilltop position and the ghost of a name preserved in a cartographer's working notes. The extensive views the site commands in all directions are the one thing that survives unchanged.