House - indeterminate date, Drinmore, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
House
On a narrow tongue of land between Lough Drin and Brittas Lough in County Westmeath, a rectangular house once stood inside a ringfort that no longer stands either.
Both have effectively vanished from the visible landscape, yet both remain recorded: a place defined almost entirely by what is no longer there.
The site sits on a south-south-west-facing slope of a high ridge at Drinmore, overlooking rough pasture. The ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead common throughout early medieval Ireland, typically consisting of a circular earthen bank enclosing a domestic area, had already been levelled by the time the house site was formally noted. Inside that levelled enclosure, the outline of a rectangular building could still be traced: roughly 8.5 metres long and 3.2 metres wide, its perimeter defined by an earthen bank around 2.2 metres wide and half a metre high. That bank has since been levelled too. No date has been established for the house, and the relationship between the building and the ringfort it occupied remains unresolved. Whether the house was contemporary with the fort, or was built into its interior at some later point by someone making use of a ready-made enclosure, is not known. The isthmus setting, pinched between two loughs, would have made the site naturally defensible and would have given it access to water on both sides, which suggests that whoever chose this spot was thinking practically about the landscape around them.
The house site is no longer visible on aerial photography, which means there is little to see on the ground today. What survives is largely the knowledge that something was here, positioned with care on a ridge between two stretches of water, inside a structure that was itself already a remnant when someone decided to build within it.