Enclosure, Brownstown, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Brownstown, Co. Westmeath

On a gentle rise in the Westmeath countryside near Brownstown, there is nothing left to see.

That, in a quiet way, is precisely what makes this spot worth knowing about. A site that cartographers in 1837 labelled a 'Fort', complete with a ruined structure in its interior, has since been levelled entirely, leaving no surface trace whatsoever.

The evidence for what once stood here comes from two mid-nineteenth century Ordnance Survey sources. The 1837 OS Fair Plan depicted a sub-rectangular enclosure, the kind of earthwork that in an Irish context typically signals early medieval occupation, perhaps a ringfort or the remnants of one, and marked it explicitly as a fort with a small rectangular ruin inside. The companion six-inch map of the same year recorded a rectangular building of roughly fifteen metres north to south and three metres east to west, sitting within a sub-rectangular field measuring approximately forty-five metres by twenty-five metres. Despite this, the site was never classified as an antiquity on any edition of the Ordnance Survey maps, a curious omission that may partly explain why it received no formal protection. A farmhouse stands about seventy metres to the northwest, suggesting the land has been in continuous agricultural use, which is the most likely reason the enclosure was eventually ploughed or graded away. What the 1837 surveyors saw and recorded, future generations would not get the chance to investigate properly.

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Pete F
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