Enclosure, Kilpatrick, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Enclosures
In the pastureland of Kilpatrick in County Westmeath, there is a place that has, for all practical purposes, ceased to exist.
No earthwork, no ring of stones, no crop mark visible from the air; whatever once stood here has been so thoroughly levelled that modern aerial photography cannot detect even a trace. What survives is not the monument itself but a single depiction of it, a dotted circle drawn on an eighteenth-century estate map, now held in the National Library of Ireland.
That estate map, catalogued as NLI MS 21 F 48 (018), records a circular enclosure at this location, the kind of roughly circular earthwork, often a ringfort or related structure, that was a common feature of early medieval Irish settlement and land use. The dotted line used to represent it may suggest the cartographer was already uncertain of its boundaries, or simply working from observation of a feature already fading into the surrounding ground. By the time the Ordnance Survey produced its six-inch map of the area in 1837, the enclosure had disappeared from the record entirely, and it was absent again from the revised twenty-five-inch edition of 1913. Whatever agricultural or drainage work erased it had done so completely, and early enough that the Victorian surveyors found nothing worth marking.