Old Grave Yard, Simonstown, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Burial Grounds

Old Grave Yard, Simonstown, Co. Westmeath

In the undulating pastureland of County Westmeath, near Simonstown, a large oval earthwork sits on a low natural ridge, labelled on an eighteenth-century estate map simply as "Old Grave Yard".

The name implies burials, but there is no evidence of graves. What the site actually represents remains genuinely open, and that ambiguity is part of what makes it interesting. The enclosure measures roughly 83 metres north to south and 47 metres east to west, outlined by an earthen bank so faint that across much of its southern arc it is barely visible at ground level. There is no identifiable entrance, and the interior is largely level, carrying only faint traces of old cultivation ridges.

The 1776 estate map of Rathconrath, held in the National Library of Ireland, is the earliest known record of the site and already treats it as something old and set apart, worth marking on paper. When field investigators described it in 1979, they found the bank partly absorbed into a later field boundary along its northern and eastern sides, suggesting the enclosure had been gradually cannibalised by agricultural reorganisation over the generations. A solitary limestone block stood upright near the centre, though the investigators considered it a cattle scratching post rather than anything monumental. Low subsidiary banks near the north-north-west hinted at rectangular features inside the enclosure, but these were indistinct and apparently disturbed. Shallow depressions along the northern and eastern interior edges pointed to the same conclusion. The site was revisited in 1987 and 1988, by which point it had been recently ploughed, but the ploughing revealed nothing further. A large pond sits at the foot of the ridge to the north-west, and the elevated position of the enclosure affords wide views across the surrounding pasture, which may or may not have been relevant to whoever originally chose this spot.

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