Settlement cluster, Mabestown, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Settlement Sites

Settlement cluster, Mabestown, Co. Westmeath

At Mabestown in County Westmeath, the outlines of small rectangular enclosures sit quietly in the landscape, barely visible until an aerial photograph reveals what ground-level observation tends to miss.

These traces of a field system were identified from a Digital Globe aerial image taken in November 2011, and what makes them particularly interesting is not the enclosures alone but the company they keep.

The field system lies roughly thirty metres south of a moated site and thirty metres east of the remains of a building. A moated site, for context, is a medieval enclosure surrounded by a water-filled or dry ditch, typically associated with the rural settlements of Anglo-Norman colonists during the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, though they were also used by Gaelic landowners. The proximity of all three features, the moated enclosure, the building, and the field system, suggests they are not coincidental. Taken together, they may represent a clustered settlement of possible medieval date, a small community that once organised its land into defined plots, lived within or beside a defended enclosure, and left behind structures that have since sunk almost entirely back into the earth. The word "possible" carries weight here; aerial photography can identify form and pattern, but confirming a medieval date requires further investigation on the ground.

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