Field system, Tevrin, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Ritual/Ceremonial
On a low rise of ground in County Westmeath, a field in grassland near Tevrin holds almost nothing visible to the eye, and yet aerial photographs taken in July 1970 told a quite different story.
At that point, a series of linear earthworks spread across the land in patterns clear enough to be read from the air, the kind of organised arrangement that speaks of deliberate human shaping of the landscape over a long period. Within a few years, those earthworks had been levelled, and today only the faintest cropmarks, the ghostly traces that buried features leave in growing crops or grass under certain light and moisture conditions, remain detectable on satellite imagery.
The 1838 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map offers a partial record of what once stood here. It shows a small rectangular chapel, orientated north to south, positioned in the western quadrant of an irregular enclosed area defined by several field banks. That chapel was Roman Catholic, and a ringfort sits roughly 290 metres to the south-south-east, suggesting the area carried layers of use across different periods. The chapel itself has left no surface trace; it too has been levelled. What the earthworks surrounding it actually represent remains an open question. They may be the remnants of a medieval field system, the kind of organised agricultural landscape that once covered much of rural Ireland in strip-like or enclosed plots. Equally, they could be settlement earthworks more directly associated with the chapel and whatever community gathered around it. The evidence, such as it was, was largely erased before that question could be properly answered.