Earthwork, Hodgestown, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Earthwork, Hodgestown, Co. Westmeath

Beneath a field of pasture in Hodgestown, County Westmeath, something circular lies buried, roughly 47 metres across, invisible to anyone walking the ground but legible from above as a faint discolouration in the grass.

It is the kind of site that only reveals itself under specific conditions, when dry summers stress the soil unevenly and buried ditches or walls hold moisture differently from the earth around them, producing a cropmark, a ghostly outline pressed into the vegetation that aerials and satellite imagery can catch but that no amount of ground-level searching would easily confirm.

The mark, a roughly circular shape approximately 47 metres in diameter on its north-to-south axis, was identified on a Google Earth orthoimage captured on 5 October 2009. Circular earthworks of this general scale in the Irish midlands are often associated with ring-forts, known in Irish as raths or lios, which were enclosed farmsteads used predominantly between the early medieval period and the early Norman era. They typically consisted of a raised interior platform ringed by one or more earthen banks and external ditches. Whether this particular site belongs to that tradition, or to something older or more unusual, cannot be said from the cropmark alone. What the image does establish is that something deliberate was once built here, and that it left an impression in the land substantial enough to persist for at least a millennium beneath the soil.

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Pete F
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