House - indeterminate date, Milltown, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
House
In a field of wet pasture outside Milltown in County Westmeath, a low spread of earthen banks traces the outline of a house that no longer carries a name, a date, or an owner.
It sits on a slight rise within a larger enclosure, and without knowing what to look for, most people would walk past it without registering anything at all. What remains is essentially a ghost floor plan pressed into the ground, its walls reduced to rubble-cored banks of earth and stone, its doorways now just gaps in those banks.
The structure is rectangular, running to an internal length of just under fifteen metres and a width of a little over five and a half metres. A bank roughly two metres wide forms the perimeter, with an entrance in the north-west corner. Inside, a smaller earthen bank divides the space into two compartments of roughly equal size, one oriented to the east-north-east and one to the west-south-west, with a gap near the north-west end of that dividing wall that almost certainly marks an internal doorway. The proportions and the two-room layout are consistent with a vernacular domestic building of the kind found across Ireland in the medieval and early modern periods, though the site carries no firm date. A further bank, low and broad, extends about twenty-nine metres to the north-north-west from the north corner of the house, suggesting some kind of associated enclosing or boundary feature. The house itself sits in the south-east quadrant of a larger enclosure, hinting at a once more complex arrangement of domestic and agricultural space that has been largely swallowed by centuries of pasture.