Earthwork, Dunnamona, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Ritual/Ceremonial
In the low-lying pasture of Dunnamona, in County Westmeath, a circular earthwork roughly sixty metres across once rose clearly enough from the surrounding land to be mapped and described in detail.
Today, aerial photography shows nothing at all. The monument has not been excavated or demolished in any dramatic sense; it has simply been absorbed, gradually and almost completely, by the ordinary processes of farming.
When surveyors recorded the site in 1981, they found a raised circular area enclosed by an earthen bank. The bank survived best along its western and northern arc, while the eastern side had been worn down to little more than a scarp, a low, uneven edge in the ground rather than a proper raised feature. Along the southern portion, the bank had been incorporated wholesale into a modern field boundary, the kind of quiet erasure that happens when a farmer finds an existing ridge convenient and builds a wall or ditch along it. Inside the enclosure, the ground showed evidence of cultivation ridges, the parallel corrugations left by historic spade or plough tillage, which suggests the interior had been worked at some point, though whether that was centuries ago or relatively recently is not recorded. Circular earthwork enclosures of this general type are found across the Irish midlands and can represent anything from early medieval ringforts, which were enclosed farmsteads, to prehistoric ceremonial sites, though without excavation it is impossible to say which category this one belongs to.
By the time satellite imagery became routinely available, the surface remains had effectively vanished. What was once legible enough to measure and describe has been flattened by decades of further agricultural activity, leaving a site that exists now primarily as a recorded absence rather than anything a visitor could observe on the ground.