Concentric enclosure, Loughagar More, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Enclosures

Concentric enclosure, Loughagar More, Co. Westmeath

On a ridge in County Westmeath, a small earthwork sits in open grassland with the kind of quiet geometry that rewards a second look.

What makes it unusual is its layered design: two concentric earthen banks enclosing a roughly circular area no more than twenty-three metres across, separated not just by a fosse (a shallow drainage or defensive ditch) but by a generous berm, a flat shelf of ground between the inner bank and the ditch, running up to ten metres wide and broadening further on the eastern side. It is an arrangement that suggests deliberate, if modest, planning, and it sits within easy sight of a neighbouring ringfort roughly seventy metres to the south-east.

Concentric enclosures of this kind are comparatively rare in the Irish archaeological record, distinct from the more familiar single-banked ringfort that dots the midland landscape. The double-bank and intervening fosse arrangement raises questions about function and status that are difficult to answer without excavation. At Loughagar More the earthworks are in a worn state: the inner bank is poorly preserved, the fosse is shallow, and the outer bank of earth and stone barely registers above the surrounding ground. A gap of just over four metres through the inner bank may represent an original entrance, and a causeway crossing the fosse at the north-east aligns with it as a probable approach route. Inside, the ground slopes gently eastward, and the outline of what may be a rectangular hut site is still legible to a careful eye. The monument was placed on the Register of Historic Monuments in May 1986.

The ridge position gives clear views to the west-north-west and north, which may or may not have influenced where the enclosure was placed, though the site's modest scale makes any strongly defensive reading feel like an overreach. Modern field fences cut across the perimeter at the north-west and south-west, which gives some sense of how thoroughly the agricultural landscape has reorganised itself around these older boundaries without entirely erasing them.

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