Military camp, Retreat, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Military Buildings

Military camp, Retreat, Co. Westmeath

Beneath a housing estate on the eastern edge of Athlone lies a pond where Williamite soldiers washed their bloodied clothes and tended their wounds after besieging one of Ireland's most contested river crossings.

The spot was known locally as The Doctor's Pool, a name that carries its own quiet weight, and the ground around it is said to hold the burials of men who did not survive the fighting. Nothing of this is visible today. The pond is gone, the field is gone, and rows of modern houses occupy the low-lying ground where a military camp once stood.

When the Williamites arrived at Athlone on 17 July 1690, they established their encampment roughly a quarter of a mile from the town, according to historian Murtagh, writing in 1970. Local tradition has long placed that camp at The Doctor's Pool, and the name Cannonsfield, which appears on the revised Ordnance Survey map of 1953, preserves at least a memory of the military character of the area. The pond itself has a small cartographic history of its own: shown as an oval feature on the 1837 six-inch Ordnance Survey map, it had been recorded as a perfectly circular shape by the time the 1910 twenty-five-inch revision was made, suggesting either natural change or some alteration to the ground over the intervening decades. The site may also have served a similar purpose during the second siege of Athlone in 1691, when Williamite forces returned to take the town more decisively. By 1983, the pond had dried out entirely, described then as a natural depression that would likely become waterlogged in winter.

There is nothing to see here in any conventional sense, which is part of what makes the place worth knowing about. The soldiers' burials, if they remain undisturbed, lie somewhere beneath foundations and tarmac. The area's layered names, a pond, a field called Cannonsfield, a housing estate, form a kind of compressed stratigraphy of forgetting, each layer making the one below it harder to reach.

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