Old Town, Tevrin, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Settlement Sites
On the southern face of a rocky knoll in the Westmeath townland of Tevrin, a scatter of grass-covered banks and stone foundations traces the outline of a settlement that had already earned the name "Old Town" by the time the first Ordnance Survey cartographers arrived in the 1830s.
Spread across roughly three hectares, the earthworks preserve the footprints of rectangular houses arranged in the manner of a clustered rural settlement, their walls now little more than low, turf-softened ridges that require a moment of adjustment before the eye begins to read them as buildings.
When the Ordnance Survey mapped the area at six inches to the mile in 1838, the site appeared as a complex of fields and small rectilinear enclosures, already labelled as "Old Town". The accompanying field name books, compiled by the survey's local correspondents, were candid about why: they noted that in the centre of the townland of Tevrin there were "a good many houses now in ruins", and that it was therefore called the old town. The phrase suggests a community memory of abandonment rather than any precise historical reckoning. A chapel site lies approximately 460 metres to the south, hinting at the kind of ecclesiastical and domestic pairing common to medieval Irish settlements. Along the southern edge of the earthwork complex, a possible sunken way runs roughly east to west; a sunken way is essentially a hollow lane worn into the ground by generations of foot and animal traffic, and where it survives it tends to be one of the more legible clues that a site was in active use over a long period. Taken together, the features point toward a medieval origin, though the precise chronology of the settlement's rise and fall remains unresolved.