Enclosure (Large), Tuitestown, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Enclosures
What makes this site quietly disorienting is the layering: a glacial landform that people from the distant past appear to have treated as raw material, shaping its natural contours into something deliberate and ceremonial.
The ridge at Tuitestown rises with two high points at its northeast and southwest ends, connected by a saddle, so that the whole thing reads from a distance like a small steep hill growing out of the top of a larger one. Around its base, a low bank, scarp, or step traces the perimeter, with a much-silted ditch running outside it, forming an enclosure that is roughly D-shaped in plan, measuring approximately 100 metres northeast to southwest and 80 metres northwest to southeast. The landscape, in other words, is neither purely natural nor neatly man-made, but something in between.
When David McGuinness surveyed the site in 2013 and published his findings in 2014, he recorded a roughly conical tumulus, a burial mound, sitting on the northeast summit of the ridge, rising up to 1.4 metres on its north side, with traces of a silted ditch still visible on the south and southeast. Some 38 metres away, on the southwest summit, faint curvilinear earthworks suggest the presence of one or perhaps two further barrows, the low earthen mounds that in Irish prehistory typically mark burial sites. Internal banks add further complexity: one runs obliquely down the northwest slope of the ridge for at least 37 metres before apparently terminating short of the enclosure perimeter, though aerial photography hints that it may continue past the main mound-barrow, partly sectioning off the northwest corner of the D-shaped area. A second stretch of low bank runs separately towards the mound without connecting to it. The picture is one of incremental, possibly multi-period use, with the natural ridge repeatedly re-interpreted rather than comprehensively planned. Sand extraction and top-dressing have since removed material from various parts of the ridge, leaving hollows that complicate the reading of what was once there. About a kilometre to the northeast, across the valley carrying the Royal Canal, another large hengiform or barrow-like monument sits on a low hilltop in Ballynaclin townland, suggesting this part of County Westmeath held more than passing significance for the communities who shaped it.