Enclosure, Moyvoughly, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Moyvoughly, Co. Westmeath

In the flat midland countryside of County Westmeath, near the townland of Moyvoughly, something circular lies just beneath the surface of a field, invisible to anyone walking past but legible from above.

A roughly circular enclosure, approximately 27 metres in diameter, shows up clearly in aerial imagery as a cropmark or soil mark, the kind of ghostly impression that centuries of ploughing can leave in the landscape without quite erasing.

Circular enclosures of this general type are among the most common archaeological features recorded across Ireland. Many are the remains of raths or ringforts, the enclosed farmsteads that once housed rural families during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. A bank and ditch would originally have defined the boundary, protecting livestock and household from the world outside. Over generations, the bank could be levelled and the ditch infilled, leaving nothing obvious at ground level but a faint difference in soil composition or crop growth that aerial photography can suddenly make legible. The Moyvoughly example, spotted in Google Earth imagery captured on 24 March 2017, has a diameter consistent with the smaller end of this type, though without excavation its date and function remain unconfirmed.

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