Clondavreen, Barbavilla Demesne, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Designed Landscapes
On a low rise in the gently rolling grassland of Barbavilla Demesne in County Westmeath, there is nothing to see.
That is precisely the point. An earthwork once stood here, small and irregular in shape, recorded carefully on the 1837 Ordnance Survey maps and then quietly dropped from every subsequent edition. At some point between those early surveys and the present day, the site was levelled. The ground has closed over it entirely, and no surface trace remains.
What survives is cartographic rather than physical. The 1837 OS Fair Plan map shows the earthwork's outline, and a separate estate map of Barbavilla Demesne, held in the National Library of Ireland, adds a curious gloss: the feature is annotated simply as "Clump" and drawn as a tree-ring, suggesting that by the time the demesne was being formally mapped, whatever original earthwork existed had either been absorbed into ornamental planting or was remembered only as a stand of trees. Barbavilla Demesne is a landed estate landscape, and the fate of this small anomaly on its pasture follows a familiar pattern, in which earlier, pre-plantation features were gradually smoothed away or reinterpreted to suit the aesthetic priorities of estate management. A ringfort, the kind of circular earthen enclosure built in early medieval Ireland for farmstead and cattle protection, survives about 280 metres to the east, which at least confirms that this corner of Westmeath was in active use long before any demesne wall was drawn around it. The levelled earthwork at Clondavreen shares that older landscape, even if nothing of it can now be walked around or touched.