placenamesDowth
Dubhadh
A field survey questioned an older identification of village remains and considered how the great mound was reused.
The name
A reliable full-name meaning has not been established here. The recorded Irish and English forms are given without an unsupported translation.
Recorded forms
- Dubhadh · Irish · main form · non-validated name
- Dowth · English · main form
Place & story
Fields where a village had been proposed
Joseph Fenwick’s published summary of his 2017 archaeological and geophysical investigation challenges the identification of earthworks between Dowth’s great mound and medieval graveyard as the remains of its manorial village. His survey instead interprets most of those features as medieval and later agricultural traces. Some spade-dug cultivation may be as recent as the nineteenth century. This concerns the interpretation of a particular field; it does not demonstrate that the documented medieval settlement never existed. [2]
A possible later use for the mound
Fenwick also identifies traces of a terraced platform with a D-shaped plan against the mound’s northeastern side. In his published abstract, this strengthens the proposal that the prehistoric monument was remodelled as a motte-and-bailey during the Anglo-Norman period. The medieval reuse remains an archaeological interpretation. It is distinct from both the mound’s original passage-tomb function and the separate tomb discovered at Dowth Hall in 2017. [2]
Geographic information
- Place type
- Civil parish
- County
- Meath
- Barony
- Slane Upper
- Coordinates
- 53.70840, -6.44701
- Mapped area
- 5.91 km²
- Logainm ID
- 1853 ↗
Sources & further reading
- Logainm.ie — Dowth. Place names and geographic record, licensed under CC BY 4.0.
- Dowth archaeological and geophysical reappraisal, published author abstract, Journal of Irish ArchaeologyXXVI2017, DOI10.13025/19725 · Joseph P. Fenwick, University of Galway research repository
Name record retrieved 2026-10-25 · Source record modified 2021-10-29. How this page was prepared.