Ringfort, Barbavilla Demesne, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Ringforts
Within the grounds of Barbavilla Demesne in County Westmeath, there was once a ringfort, the circular earthen enclosure that served as the farmstead and domestic centre of an early medieval Irish family, typically defined by a raised bank and ditch.
It no longer exists above ground. Aerial photographs show no surface trace of it whatsoever, and the land has long since been levelled flat. What makes it worth noting is precisely this quality of documented disappearance: we know it was there because someone drew it, and that drawing has survived.
An estate map of Barbavilla Demesne, held in the National Library of Ireland, shows the earthwork as a circular feature positioned within a woodland plantation on the demesne grounds. The local area is annotated as Clondavreen on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, a placename that carries its own quiet suggestion of earlier occupation, the kind of Irish townland name often rooted in features or families that predate any formal mapping by centuries. Estate maps from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were practical documents, drawn to record land ownership and improvement schemes, and ringforts occasionally appear in them almost incidentally, as obstacles in a field or curiosities within a designed landscape. In this case the plantation may have offered the monument a degree of accidental protection for a time, sheltering it inside a managed woodland. Whatever that protection amounted to, it was not enough.