Mound, Glassamucky, Co. Dublin
Co. Dublin |
Ritual/Ceremonial
On the steep western flank of a hill called Knockanteedan, above the weir at Glenasmole in the Dublin Mountains, there is a mound that raises more questions than it answers.
It measures around 27 metres in diameter and stands roughly 2 metres high, which is modest by the standards of prehistoric earthworks, and its origins remain unresolved. What gives it a quietly unsettling quality is not its size but its condition: by the time anyone thought to record it properly, it had already been significantly altered.
The mound appears on the 1938 Ordnance Survey six-inch map as a small hachured earthwork, the hachure marks being the cartographic shorthand surveyors used to indicate a raised or mounded feature in the landscape. When the site was inspected in the mid-1970s by Healy, it was found to have been much disturbed, though the record does not specify how or by whom. The survey was later compiled by Geraldine Stout and Padraig Clancy, whose work on Dublin's archaeological record has helped bring sites like this one into any kind of documentation at all. Whether the mound is prehistoric, early medieval, or something else entirely is not established in the surviving record.
Glenasmole itself is a secluded valley that cuts south into the Dublin Mountains, and Knockanteedan sits on its western edge with views down towards the reservoir weir below. The approach to this part of the valley involves narrow roads and some uphill walking across open hillside, so reasonable footwear is worth considering. The mound sits on ground that slopes sharply, which means it can be easy to misjudge its shape when you are standing on it. Given how disturbed the earthwork had become even by the 1970s, a visitor today should not expect a well-defined form; what remains is suggestive rather than conclusive, a slight rising in the hillside that takes on more meaning once you know it has been mapped and noted at all.
