Ringfort (Rath), Rath, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Rath, Co. Westmeath

A field fence cuts straight through this ancient enclosure in County Westmeath, a practical intrusion that tells you something about how the landscape has been used and reused across the centuries.

The ringfort sits on a gentle natural rise in undulating pasture, its roughly circular outline still legible on the ground, though the earthen bank and fosse, the shallow outer ditch that once accompanied it, have worn down considerably over time. That combination of features, a raised bank with an accompanying ditch, is typical of a rath, the most common type of early medieval enclosed settlement in Ireland, generally associated with farming families of some local standing. Here, only the stretch running from the east around to the south retains any real definition.

The enclosure measures approximately 45 metres north to south and 42 metres east to west, making it a fairly standard size for this type of monument. More interesting, perhaps, is what happened inside it long after its original use had ended. The slightly raised interior still carries faint traces of cultivation ridges running north to south, the kind of lazy-bed or ridge-and-furrow pattern associated with small-scale tillage farming. The fact that these ridges run across the monument rather than respecting its edges suggests the site was at some point simply folded into the agricultural routine of the surrounding land, its earlier significance either forgotten or set aside. The field fence cutting through the northeastern side was built after 1700, and it slices across both the outer bank and the fosse, treating the monument as just another feature to be managed around. Roughly 420 metres to the west lies a ring-barrow, a low circular burial mound of a quite different period and purpose, which hints that this corner of Westmeath was a place of some significance across a long stretch of prehistory and early history.

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