Enclosure, Monktown, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Enclosures
For most of its recorded life, this circular enclosure in Monktown, County Westmeath, has been hiding in plain sight, mistaken for an ordinary field boundary.
The northern arc of the monument, roughly thirty-two metres in diameter, has been quietly preserved along a curving fence line that appears on every edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, suggesting it has been there long enough to be absorbed into the working landscape without anyone thinking too hard about what it actually was.
It was aerial photography that eventually gave the game away. Digital Globe satellite imagery revealed the full circular outline, showing that what farmers and mapmakers had long treated as a convenient boundary was in fact the remnant of a much older, deliberately constructed enclosure. Circular enclosures of this kind are a common feature of the Irish countryside, ranging from early medieval ringforts, which served as enclosed farmsteads, to ceremonial or ritual sites of considerably greater antiquity. Without excavation, it is difficult to say with certainty which tradition this particular example belongs to, but the form and scale are consistent with early medieval use. What is notable here is the way the monument survived at all, not through burial or remoteness, but through its accidental adoption as a property line, generation after generation drawing a fence along a curve whose origins had been long forgotten.
