Mound, Clonlost, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Ritual/Ceremonial
On a glacial hillock in County Westmeath, a low, eye-shaped earthwork sits in a state of studied ambiguity.
It measures roughly 28 metres at its longest, narrows to a point at the west, and carries a small stone cairn, a pile of stones partly grassed over, offset towards its broader eastern end. A mature sycamore grows near the centre. The hillock itself appears to have been deliberately scarped, its upper surface levelled to create a raised platform, though quarrying has damaged the whole ensemble and loose stones lie scattered across the summit. What the feature actually is has never been settled to anyone's satisfaction, and that unresolved quality is part of what makes it worth attention.
The 1837 Ordnance Survey Fair Plan labels the spot the 'Moat of Cornasop', a name that hints at a cairn or burial mound of some antiquity. A barrow, in the Irish archaeological sense, is a burial monument typically dating to the Bronze Age or earlier, often comprising a mound of earth or stone raised over a grave. Yet the same 1837 mapping also depicts the hillock as a grove of trees within the demesne lands of Clonlost House, which stood some 360 metres to the south-south-east, raising the possibility that the whole feature is simply a post-medieval landscape ornament. A third suggestion, put forward in a 1998 fieldwork note, is that it might have served as a platform for a windmill connected with late medieval settlement. Surveying the site in 2015, David McGuinness noted that its location atop what may be a kame, a ridge or mound deposited by glacial meltwater, alongside two crescent-shaped dead-ice hollows immediately adjacent, echoes the siting of known barrows elsewhere in Westmeath. He also observed that the cairn's eccentric placement on the scarped platform resembles the arrangement seen in some of the county's stepped-barrows. About 250 metres to the south-east sits a ruined medieval church and burial ground whose surrounding roadway, according to the archaeologist Leo Swan writing in 1988, preserves the curve of an early medieval curvilinear vallum, an enclosing boundary typical of early Irish ecclesiastical sites, which approaches to within roughly 100 metres of the mound. Whether that proximity is coincidental or meaningful remains an open question, much like everything else about this quietly perplexing hilltop.