Enclosure, Ballyglass, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Ballyglass, Co. Westmeath

On a low, damp rise in the rough pasture of Ballyglass, there is a monument that no longer exists above ground, and perhaps never looked like much even when it did.

What we know of it comes almost entirely from a single 18th-century estate map, held in the National Library of Ireland, on which a draughtsman recorded a circular enclosure sitting in this corner of County Westmeath. No trace of it is visible today at ground level, and aerial photography has failed to pick it up either. It survives, if that is the right word, only as an ink outline on old paper.

Circular enclosures of this kind are broadly associated with the early medieval period in Ireland, though without excavation it is impossible to say anything precise about the date or function of this particular example. What the estate map does confirm is that someone in the 1700s considered it worth recording, suggesting it retained some visible form at that time, even if the intervening centuries of agricultural use have since erased whatever earthworks remained. The site sits in company with two ringforts, a ringfort being a roughly circular enclosure defined by an earthen bank and ditch, once used as a farmstead or settlement, that are located approximately 150 metres to the south-south-west and 165 metres to the south-east respectively. Whether this clustering reflects a period of shared activity or simply the long history of settlement on this gently rolling landscape is unknown.

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