Burial mound, Taghmon, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Burial Sites
When Westmeath County Council set about widening the Crookedwood to Castlepollard road in September 1933, the work cut into the side of an unremarkable hillock near Taghmon and exposed something that had lain undisturbed for thousands of years.
What appeared to be a natural rise in the ground turned out to have been consciously chosen, and probably shaped, by Bronze Age people as a place to bury their dead. Five separate burials were eventually uncovered, spread across two seasons of discovery and arranged at varying depths within the mound.
The most elaborate of these was the deepest. Nearly two and a half metres below the surface, the first burial lay inside what appears to have been a corbelled cist, a small chamber built from stones laid in overlapping courses to form a beehive-shaped enclosure, roughly 1.2 metres across and 0.9 metres high. The person interred there had been placed in a crouched position, the head resting on a flat stone, and fragments of a bowl food-vessel, a type of ceramic associated with Bronze Age funerary practice in Ireland and Britain, were found alongside the remains. A second burial, that of a child, lay shallower to the south-east. A third crouched inhumation, surrounded by small stones and positioned with the right hand tucked beneath the jaw and the left arm drawn before the body, was found at just over two metres depth. To its west, a fourth burial had been cremated rather than interred intact, and was ringed by larger stones. A fifth crouched inhumation, the head resting near a large boulder, came to light the following year in 1934, a couple of metres from the third. The mix of burial types, crouched inhumation alongside cremation, and the reuse of a natural landform rather than a purpose-built earthen mound, makes this a particularly layered site, one that speaks to the varied and locally negotiated funerary customs of Bronze Age communities in the Irish midlands.