Ringfort (Rath), Corry, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Ringforts
What remains of this early medieval farmstead in the Westmeath countryside is barely enough to read as a monument at all.
The southern half has been levelled entirely, and the only clue to that lost portion is a dark band of vegetation roughly five metres wide, the kind of subtle botanical scar that most walkers would pass without a second glance. A ringfort, sometimes called a rath, was typically a circular earthen enclosure used as a defended farmstead during the early medieval period in Ireland, perhaps occupied between the fifth and twelfth centuries. This one, on a slight natural rise amid gently undulating pasture, once measured approximately thirty metres across from east to west.
The 1837 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map records it as a complete circular enclosure, which means the damage here is relatively recent in historical terms, most likely the result of agricultural clearance after that date. What survives is a poorly preserved earthen bank along the western to north-eastern arc of the original circuit, and that fragment has been quietly absorbed into a post-1700 field fence that curves around the northern quadrant of the monument. It is a common fate for earthworks in farmed landscapes: the boundary that once defined a household becomes, over generations, simply a convenient field division, reshaped and maintained for entirely practical reasons until its origins become almost invisible. A second ringfort lies roughly sixty metres to the northwest, suggesting this part of Corry was once a settled, populated place.