Enclosure, Clonlost, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Clonlost, Co. Westmeath

On a natural rise in the quietly rolling pasture of County Westmeath, there is a monument that effectively ceased to exist sometime around 1970, when a farmer put a deep plough through it.

What had been an enclosed earthwork, roughly 66 metres north to south and 48 metres east to west, was flattened in a single agricultural season. An ESB electricity pole now stands near what was once the centre of the site, and a scarp of earth, at most a metre and a half high, curves around the southern edge, though even that modest remnant may be nothing more than a natural slope in the land.

The site sat at around 109 metres above sea level, elevated enough above the surrounding terrain to offer clear views in every direction, which is exactly the kind of position that early medieval communities in Ireland favoured when constructing enclosures and ringforts. A ringfort, the more familiar circular type of enclosed settlement that was in widespread use from roughly the early centuries AD through to the early medieval period, still survives about 95 metres to the south. The levelled enclosure was a different shape, described on the 1837 Ordnance Survey Fair Plan map as subrectilinear, meaning broadly rectangular with somewhat irregular sides. That map labels it simply as "Fort", which tells us it was still visible and legible as a monument nearly two centuries ago. By 1970 it was gone. Two concentrations of stones turned up by the ploughing remain unexplained, their purpose and age unrecorded. The site can still be traced in aerial photography as a faint cropmark, where differences in soil moisture and plant growth betray the ghost of the old boundary beneath the grass, but there is nothing on the ground that would announce itself as ancient.

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