Ringfort, Galmoylestown, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Ringforts

Ringfort, Galmoylestown, Co. Westmeath

Near the top of a prominent hill in County Westmeath, on a south-south-east facing slope with wide views of the surrounding countryside, there is very nearly nothing to see.

A shallow, semi-circular depression in the grassland is all that physically survives of a ringfort, the circular or oval earthwork enclosures built across Ireland from roughly the early medieval period onward, typically as defended farmsteads. The ground has been levelled, the bank reduced to almost nothing, and only that faint hollow in the earth hints at what once stood here. What makes the site stranger still is that a second ringfort sits just 200 metres to the south-east, meaning this hilltop was once, in some sense, a place of significance rather than a blank stretch of pasture.

The earliest documentary trace of the site comes from the 1837 Ordnance Survey Fair Plan map, which depicts it as an oval-shaped enclosure and labels it simply as a "fort", the standard term mapmakers of that era used for earthwork enclosures of this kind. By the time the Ordnance Survey returned to revise its six-inch maps in 1944, the enclosure was already registering as a diminished thing, the semi-circular depression that remains today corresponding closely to what was recorded then. The levelling almost certainly happened in the intervening decades, most likely as agricultural land was improved and old earthworks removed to ease ploughing or grazing. The site did not disappear entirely from the record, however. An aerial photograph taken in November 2011 by Digital Globe captured a cropmark, the faint outline of the buried monument made visible from above when soil moisture and vegetation growth betray the presence of disturbed ground beneath, tracing the ghost of the original enclosure against the surrounding field.

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Pete F
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