Earthwork, Cavestown And Rosmead, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Ritual/Ceremonial
In the townlands of Cavestown and Rosmead in County Westmeath, there is a site that has effectively ceased to exist, and yet it persists in the record.
An earthwork once occupied a gentle slope of grassland that fell away towards marshy ground to the south and south-east, the kind of low, wet terrain that frequently bordered early settlement sites in the Irish midlands. Today, nothing of it can be seen above ground, and the area has since been absorbed into a forestry plantation, the original landscape buried under commercial conifers.
The sole evidence that anything was ever here comes from William Larkin's 1808 Map of County Westmeath, a detailed county survey held in the National Library of Ireland. Larkin's map captured the earthwork at a moment when it was apparently still considered worth recording, even if it was already fading. Earthworks of this kind, which is to say raised or banked enclosures formed from piled or cut earth rather than stone, occur widely across Ireland and can date from the prehistoric period through to the early medieval, serving variously as enclosures for settlements, ceremonial spaces, or field boundaries. Without excavation or surviving surface features, it is impossible to say what purpose this particular one served, or how old it was. What the map preserves is simply its outline and its location, a cartographic ghost.
