Hut site, Tevrin, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Settlement Sites
In a field of undulating grassland in Tevrin, County Westmeath, an early medieval settlement lies partly beneath a Catholic chapel.
Turin R.C. Chapel, still standing today, was built on the eastern quadrant of a ringfort, a fact recorded as early as the first Ordnance Survey mapping of Ireland in 1838. That a place of Christian worship came to occupy part of an older enclosure is not unusual in the Irish landscape, where ecclesiastical and prehistoric sites frequently overlap, but the layering here is unusually legible.
The ringfort itself is a platform type, meaning it was constructed as a raised, levelled area rather than simply an earthen bank enclosing flat ground. Within and around this platform, traces of four possible hut sites survive, along with a square depression to the west of the interior that may represent a fifth. Beneath the surface, there is also evidence of a possible collapsed souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber typically associated with ringforts and used for storage or refuge. A stream running roughly 35 metres to the south marks the boundary between the townland of Tevrin and the neighbouring townland of Killynan, placing the site at what would once have been a meaningful edge of territory. Taken together, these elements suggest a small but reasonably complex settlement, most likely dating to the early medieval period when ringforts were in widespread use across Ireland.