Monument, Lakill And Moortown, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Holy Sites & Wells

Monument, Lakill And Moortown, Co. Westmeath

There is something quietly absurd about a place that is recorded on every edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps simply as "Monument", and yet, when someone finally went to look, there was nothing there at all.

No stone, no plinth, no earthwork, no inscription. Just a high earthen bank running along the roadside boundary, doing what earthen banks do, which is very little.

The site sits in the townlands of Lakill and Moortown in County Westmeath, and whatever it once marked, it had already vanished by 1983, when a field investigator noted that no visible trace of any monument or archaeological feature could be found on the roadside. The maps, across all their successive editions, kept the label faithfully, even as the thing itself disappeared. A wayside cross, the kind of small roadside religious marker common across rural Ireland, is recorded about 340 metres to the west, which hints at a landscape that once had some density of meaning along this stretch of road. But the monument itself, whatever form it originally took, left no physical echo behind it, only a cartographic one.

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Pete F
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