House - indeterminate date, Loughagar More, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
House
On the summit of a low east-west ridge in County Westmeath, surrounded by gently rolling grassland, there is a shallow depression in the ground that may once have been somebody's home.
It measures roughly nine metres north to south and thirteen metres east to west, a sub-rectangular hollow sitting at the centre of a concentric enclosure, and it offers good views out to the north-west and north. That is, more or less, all that remains. Whether it was a dwelling or some other form of structure, the archaeological record cannot yet say with confidence, which is part of what makes it quietly interesting. The land holds the outline of a life, but not enough detail to fill it in.
The depression sits within what is recorded as a concentric enclosure, a type of earthwork in which one boundary ring is set inside another, often associated with early medieval settlement activity in Ireland. Just seventy metres to the south-east lies a ringfort, the circular earthen enclosure that was the standard form of enclosed farmstead across Ireland roughly from the early Christian period through to the early medieval centuries. The proximity of the two features suggests this particular ridge was a meaningful place to settle, commanding the surrounding landscape and placed within a cluster of structures whose exact relationships to one another remain unclear. The house, if that is what it is, sits at the quiet centre of all of this ambiguity.