Settlement cluster, Sheepstown, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Settlement Sites

Settlement cluster, Sheepstown, Co. Westmeath

In a field at Sheepstown in County Westmeath, a series of low earthworks spread across roughly 2.3 hectares without ever quite announcing what they are.

There is a sub-rectangular enclosure, about 37 metres from north-north-east to south-south-west and 27 metres across, ringed by an earthen bank and a fosse, the term for a shallow defensive or boundary ditch, though the fosse is now only legible along the north-eastern side. To the south of this enclosure, what looks like a sunken road runs roughly west to east before turning south-east, the kind of hollowed trackway that centuries of foot and cart traffic can press into soft ground. Cultivation ridges, the parallel raised strips left by old ploughing or lazy-bed farming, are visible in the south-east corner. Taken together, these features sketch out the ghost of a small, organised settlement, though whose settlement, and from which century, remains genuinely open.

The earliest firm documentary trace comes from the Ordnance Survey six-inch map published in 1837, which shows the rectangular enclosure as a trapezoidal field with a house sitting beside it, and a pond marked to the north of that building. It is possible that some of the earthworks are simply the residue of that nineteenth-century farmstead and its drainage arrangements around the pond. It is equally possible that parts of the complex are considerably older. About 230 metres to the north-east lies a separate feature catalogued as a possible moated site, a moated site being a medieval enclosure, typically Anglo-Norman in origin, defined by a raised platform or dwelling surrounded by a water-filled or wet ditch. Whether the Sheepstown earthworks share any relationship with that feature, in date or in function, is not currently known. The aerial photography that brought the full extent of the earthwork complex into focus was taken in November 2011, and the site remains undated.

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Pete F
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