Earthwork, Ladestown, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Ritual/Ceremonial
In a field near Ladestown in County Westmeath, an irregular earthwork sits largely unnoticed, its outline stretching roughly 90 metres north to south and 110 metres east to west.
It is the kind of feature that would be easy to walk past without a second thought, yet when seen from above it resolves into something clearly deliberate, a boundary or enclosure of uncertain age and purpose pressed into the landscape.
The earthwork came to wider attention not through excavation or fieldwork but through aerial photography, specifically imagery captured by Google Earth and Digital Globe on 20 November 2005. It was identified and recorded by Caimin O'Brien, working from details supplied by Jean-Charles Caillère, and formally uploaded as a site record in March 2020. Beyond its dimensions and irregular shape, very little is currently documented about what function it served or when it was constructed. Earthworks of this general kind can represent the remains of enclosures, field boundaries, or even settlement sites, but without further investigation this one resists easy classification.