Hilltop enclosure, Creewood, Co. Meath

Co. Meath |

Enclosures

Hilltop enclosure, Creewood, Co. Meath

A prehistoric enclosure that no official map has ever labelled as such occupies the crest of a low ridge in County Meath, its outline preserved not by any archaeological designation but by the accident of a townland boundary.

The boundary between Rathbranchurch to the north and Creewood to the south traces a conspicuous arc across the 1836 and 1908 editions of the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, and that arc, it turns out, follows the curve of an ancient earthwork almost exactly. The structure itself is subcircular, roughly 90 metres across on its longer axis, and sits at the highest point of a short north-east to south-west ridge about 230 metres in length.

What survives on the ground is a grass-covered earthen bank, approximately three metres wide at its base and rising around one and a half metres above the interior, with stone facing visible on its outer side. Outside the bank, a shallow fosse, a ditch dug to define and reinforce the perimeter, runs along the north-west to east-south-east arc; it is about six metres wide but only around 20 centimetres deep today, worn down by centuries of grazing and weather. The enclosure commands wide views in all directions, and the most significant of these looks eastward, towards the complex of prehistoric monuments clustered around Slieve Breagh, roughly 700 metres away. Whether the two sites were ever connected in function or in the minds of the people who used them is unknown, but the visual relationship is difficult to ignore. The fact that no cartographer ever marked this earthwork as an antiquity means it has spent the better part of two centuries hiding in plain sight, its outline quietly maintained by the administrative line between two townlands.

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Pete F
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