Hilltop enclosure, Carpenterstown, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Enclosures

Hilltop enclosure, Carpenterstown, Co. Westmeath

On a hilltop in Carpenterstown, County Westmeath, there is a large circular earthwork that has been so thoroughly worn down by time and farming that it is barely visible to someone standing inside it.

The enclosure measures approximately 77 metres across from north to south, and only a low scarp, a kind of eroded bank or edge rising to about 1.1 metres, survives to mark its outline, and even that is discernible only from the south-western and western approaches. What makes the site quietly puzzling is precisely this near-erasure: something substantial enough to have required considerable effort to construct has been reduced to a faint impression in the landscape, its full outline becoming clear only when viewed on aerial photographs taken in November 2011.

The interior of the enclosure still bears the marks of later agricultural activity, with cultivation ridges running roughly west-northwest to east-southeast across the ground, the kind of lazy-bed or ridge-and-furrow patterns associated with tillage farming in Ireland over many centuries. Alongside these are several humps and hollows whose purpose remains unknown. Whether they represent earlier structural features, pits, or something else entirely, the notes offer no answer, and archaeology has not yet supplied one. The site sits at the top of a high hill with open views across the surrounding country, a location that, in the Irish early medieval period, was often chosen for enclosures with a ceremonial, territorial, or defensive function. A ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead typically dating from the early medieval period, lies about 175 metres to the north-northwest, suggesting this part of Westmeath was once a more populated and organised landscape than it might appear today.

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Pete F
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