Building, Culleen Beg, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Utility Structures
On a south-facing slope in the pastureland of Culleen Beg, County Westmeath, there are buildings that have been disappearing for at least two centuries, and are now very nearly gone.
What makes this site quietly compelling is precisely that erasure, and the way the historical record has tracked it at intervals, each time finding a little less to describe.
The earliest documentary evidence comes from William Larkin's 1808 map of County Westmeath, held in the National Library of Ireland, which marks the location plainly as a 'Ruin'. By the time the Ordnance Survey produced its six-inch map in 1837, the site had vanished from the cartographic record entirely, and the revised twenty-five-inch edition of 1913 likewise ignored it. When the monument was described in 1983, there was still something to see: several rectangular structures defined by sod-covered wall footings, arranged around a small central rectangular area. Low earth and stone banks adjoined these footings, some forming irregular enclosures, with a second, less distinct cluster of grass-covered wall foundations extending westward. It was a place that rewarded careful looking, even if it no longer announced itself. Since then, even that has faded. Recent aerial photography shows the wall footings are no longer visible from above, the outlines absorbed back into the field they once occupied.
What the structures originally were remains unrecorded. The arrangement, several rectangular buildings disposed around a central space, with enclosing banks, might suggest a small farmstead or ancillary agricultural complex, but nothing in the surviving record confirms this. The site sits in ordinary pasture now, its history compressed into the gap between Larkin's annotation and the blank spaces of the later maps.