Enclosure, Ballintober, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Enclosures
Beneath the tarmac of a road in Ballintober, Co. Westmeath, lies the ghost of a circular enclosure that nobody much notices any more, largely because the road has cut it clean in two.
It is the kind of monument that only becomes legible from the air, when the soil reveals what centuries of farming and road-building have obscured at ground level.
Aerial photography of the site shows the outline of a roughly circular enclosure measuring approximately 48 metres in diameter, bisected by a modern road. Enclosures of this form are among the most common monument types in the Irish landscape, and the category covers a wide range of possible origins, from early medieval ringforts, which were enclosed farmsteads surrounded by an earthen bank and ditch, to prehistoric ceremonial sites or later field systems. Without excavation, it is difficult to say which category this one belongs to, but the circular shape and the scale are broadly consistent with a ringfort. What makes this particular example quietly telling is the road itself, which does not merely pass beside the monument but runs directly through it, suggesting that by the time the road was laid out, the enclosure had already lost whatever earthwork remained above ground and was no longer recognisable as anything worth routing around.