Enclosure, Ardbuckan, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Enclosures
There is something quietly melancholy about a monument that disappears not once but twice.
The rectangular enclosure at Ardbuckan in County Westmeath has been erased from the landscape so thoroughly that it no longer appears even on aerial photography, the ground above it now covered by planted forestry where open pasture once lay.
The enclosure first appears on the revised 1913 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, recorded as a rectangular shape set in flat, open farmland. It was never marked as an antiquity on any edition of the OS six-inch map, which suggests it was noted more as a field boundary or landscape feature than as a recognised archaeological site. By 1983, a survey visit found no surface remains whatsoever, the monument having been levelled at some point before that. The OS twenty-five inch map, which offers greater detail at a larger scale, shows the same outline but as an ordinary rectangular field rather than anything with historical designation. What the enclosure originally was, and when it was built or used, remains unrecorded.
