Earthwork, Johnstown, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Earthwork, Johnstown, Co. Westmeath

In the rolling pasture outside Johnstown in County Westmeath, a farm track cuts across ground where an earthwork once stood.

The track runs roughly east-northeast to west-southwest, and in doing so it bisects what survives, or rather what no longer does, of a monument that was already fading from the landscape long before anyone thought to record its disappearance formally.

The earthwork appears on Larkin's 1808 map of County Westmeath, a county-wide survey held in the National Library of Ireland, which places it clearly enough that its general location can be fixed. But by the time the Ordnance Survey produced its six-inch map in 1837, the feature had vanished from the cartographic record entirely, and it was absent again from the revised twenty-five-inch edition of 1913. What the OS maps did preserve, for a time, was a curved field fence to the north and east of the site, a gentle arc in the boundary that likely followed the outer edge of the original earthwork scarp. That curve is now gone too, removed when the farm track was laid out. By 1980, anyone who visited would have found no surface remains at all. The monument had been levelled. Only a possible partial outline of the scarp, visible at the southern edge on aerial photography, suggests where the structure once sat in the ground.

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Pete F
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