Building, Addinstown, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Utility Structures

Building, Addinstown, Co. Westmeath

On a low hill in County Westmeath, at 301 feet above the surrounding countryside, there is effectively nothing to see.

That absence is, in its own way, the point. What once stood here, a circular enclosure with a rectangular ruined building at its centre, has been so thoroughly levelled that no surface trace remains of either structure. The hill still offers good views in every direction, and a concrete triangulation point, the kind of survey marker that the Ordnance Survey used to fix positions across the landscape, sits in the south-western quadrant of what was once the monument. That trig point is now the most tangible thing on the ground.

The 1837 Ordnance Survey Fair Plan map recorded the site clearly: a circular enclosure, the kind of form most commonly associated with early medieval ringforts, with a rectangular ruin inside it, annotated simply as 'fort' and 'ruins'. By the following year's six-inch map, the enclosure was shown sitting within a square tree plantation, one established after 1700, which suggests that whoever owned the land in the post-medieval period had chosen to formalise or ornament the old earthwork rather than clear it. Addinstown House lies roughly 190 metres to the north-west, and it is plausible that the plantation was laid out in connection with that estate, perhaps treating the ancient enclosure as a landscape feature. At some point after those maps were made, both the earthwork and the building within it were removed entirely from the ground, leaving only the cartographic record as evidence that anything was ever there.

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Pete F
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