Ringfort (Rath), Grangegeeth, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Grangegeeth, Co. Westmeath

A road cuts straight through the western edge of this early medieval enclosure in County Westmeath, the modern townland boundary between Grangegeeth and Piercefield, or Templeoran, slicing across what would once have been a continuous earthen perimeter.

That kind of incremental erasure is common enough in the Irish landscape, but here the monument has suffered from more than one direction at once, which makes what survives all the more worth pausing over.

The site is a rath, the everyday term for a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead built predominantly during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Hundreds of thousands once existed across Ireland; a significant proportion have been lost to agriculture and development. This example sits on a small natural rise in gently undulating grassland, with open views from the west-southwest through to the north. The enclosure is oval in plan, approximately twenty-one metres across on its north-south axis, and defined by an earthen bank that has been considerably reduced. Along the northwestern arc the bank has been levelled, while from the northeast around to the south it has been brought down to exterior ground level, likely the result of quarrying at some point in the past. Across the interior, faint traces of cultivation ridges run northeast to southwest, a sign that the enclosed area was at some stage turned over to tillage, obscuring or disturbing whatever earlier deposits might lie beneath. The ground rises slightly towards the centre. Within a short distance, the site sits in a cluster of related monuments: a possible second ringfort lies about thirty metres to the northwest, and a moated site, a type of later medieval enclosed farmstead typically consisting of a raised platform surrounded by a water-filled ditch, is located around three hundred and twenty metres to the northeast.

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