Enclosure (Large), Loughagar More, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Enclosures

Enclosure (Large), Loughagar More, Co. Westmeath

On a low rise in the gently undulating pasture of Loughagar More in County Westmeath, there is a large enclosure that has effectively ceased to exist above ground, yet continues to reveal itself from the air.

What was once an earthwork stretching roughly 125 metres on its long axis has been ploughed and levelled so thoroughly that no surface trace remains. What persists is a cropmark, a D-shaped ghost visible only because the buried remains cause crops or grass above them to grow at a different rate from the surrounding land. This kind of differential growth, captured on aerial photography, is one of the quieter ways that vanished monuments leave their silhouettes on the landscape.

The enclosure has a documented history of gradual erasure. When the Ordnance Survey recorded it on their six-inch map in 1837, it appeared as a substantial, roughly oblong earthwork with a straight side at the south-west end, and their Fair Plan annotated it simply as a fort, a term used loosely in the nineteenth century for earthen enclosures of all periods. By the time the revised twenty-five-inch OS map was produced in 1913, the monument had already been reduced and truncated along its south-west end by a field boundary running north-west to south-east, giving it the shorter, D-shaped outline that later records would continue to describe. Oblique aerial photographs taken in July 1966 by the Cambridge University Collection of Aerial Photography captured the enclosure still visible from the air, along with what appears to be a possible field system immediately to its south-south-east. Today, the cropmark alone survives, detectable on satellite imagery as an area of differential growth. The site sits on a low rise with open views in all directions, a position that would have made practical sense for whoever built and used the enclosure, though without excavation its date and purpose remain unconfirmed.

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