Earthwork, Gartlandstown, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Earthwork, Gartlandstown, Co. Westmeath

Three hundred metres east of Lough Derravaragh, a faint circular scar sits in a field near Gartlandstown in County Westmeath.

It is easy to miss at ground level, registering only as a low rise in the grass, but seen from above in satellite imagery it resolves into a roughly circular shape about fifty metres across, its outline traced by a scarp, a slight but definite change in ground level that marks where an earthwork once stood. The structure has been levelled over time, most likely by centuries of agricultural activity, but it has not entirely disappeared.

The site appears on the Ordnance Survey Ireland twenty-five-inch map, which places its surveying in the late nineteenth century, and the scarp visible there matches what aerial imagery from between 2011 and 2013 still shows as a gentle undulation in the field surface. Circular earthworks of this kind in the Irish midlands are often the remains of ringforts, the most common type of early medieval settlement in Ireland, typically consisting of a bank and ditch enclosing a domestic area used by a farming family. A diameter of around fifty metres falls well within the normal range for such structures. Lough Derravaragh itself, the lake just to the west, is one of the larger lakes in Westmeath and sits within a landscape that was densely settled throughout the early medieval period, making the presence of such an earthwork in its vicinity entirely plausible, even if nothing more specific about the function or date of this particular example has been recorded.

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