Enclosure (Large), Tuitestown, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Enclosures

Enclosure (Large), Tuitestown, Co. Westmeath

On a gentle rise in the pastureland of Tuitestown, County Westmeath, there is an oval earthwork roughly 86 metres long and 60 metres wide that nobody has quite managed to explain.

It does not appear on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1837, nor on the revised twenty-five-inch edition of 1913, which means that generations of cartographers either missed it or did not consider it worth recording. That absence from the historical map record is itself a quiet puzzle, given that the earthwork is clearly visible from aerial photography as a substantial, well-defined oval shape pressed into the ground.

When the monument was described in 1980, surveyors noted a low, indistinct scarp, the slight ridge of earth that defines the outer edge of the enclosure, along with faint traces of a fosse at the north-west. A fosse is simply a ditch, typically dug to reinforce the boundary of an enclosure and to provide material for the bank alongside it. Here, though, the fosse is broad, shallow, and poorly preserved, which makes interpretation difficult. The interior of the earthwork rises from the perimeter toward the centre, where a large stone sits on the surface. Crossing that interior are old cultivation ridges running roughly north-east to south-west, and crucially, those ridges stop at the boundary of the earthwork and do not continue into the surrounding field. That detail suggests the earthwork was already a distinct, bounded feature when the ridges were being worked. Old field banks intersect the exterior at the south-west and south-east, and a second, smaller subrectangular earthwork lies to the north-west, associated with a long curvilinear field bank. Whether the main feature was ever a proper enclosure in the archaeological sense, perhaps a ringfort or a stock enclosure, or whether it is simply a natural rise whose edges were deliberately scarped to create a small field, remains genuinely unresolved.

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Pete F
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