Earthwork, Hopestown, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Earthwork, Hopestown, Co. Westmeath

In the rolling pasture outside Hopestown, County Westmeath, there is a monument that exists only on paper.

An earthwork was recorded here on William Larkin's 1808 map of County Westmeath, a detailed county survey now held in the National Library of Ireland. By the time the Ordnance Survey produced its six-inch map in 1837, the feature had already vanished from the cartographic record. The revised twenty-five-inch edition of 1913 confirmed its absence. By 1970, anyone who looked was told there were no surface remains visible at all. Today, aerial photography shows nothing but grass.

What exactly stood here is unknown. The word earthwork covers a broad category of raised or ditched features, from ancient enclosures and burial mounds to field boundaries and defensive ringworks, and Larkin's map does not elaborate. What the sequence of maps does tell us is that whatever shape the monument once held above ground, it was either levelled or eroded to invisibility sometime in the early nineteenth century, in the decades between Larkin's survey and the first Ordnance Survey pass across Westmeath. Agricultural improvement during that period reshaped enormous stretches of the Irish midlands, and features that had survived for centuries sometimes disappeared within a generation of intensive land use. The undulating pasture that surrounds the site today gives no outward sign that anything was ever there.

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Pete F
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