Ringfort (Rath), Clondalever, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Ringforts
On a long, narrow ridge in County Westmeath, oriented roughly north-north-east to south-south-west and surrounded by hills on all sides, sits a ringfort that has been quietly losing ground to the landscape for some time.
Part of its perimeter has been dug away on the eastern and south-eastern sides, and the interior has been left uneven by quarrying. What survives is still legible as an enclosure, but only just, and that sense of something half-erased is part of what makes it worth attention.
The site is a rath, the most common type of ringfort in Ireland, typically consisting of a circular or oval area enclosed by one or more earthen banks with an external ditch, or fosse, and used during the early medieval period as a farmstead or residence. Here, the enclosure is oval, roughly twenty-four metres across on its north-east to south-west axis, defined by a slight earth and stone bank and a shallow fosse that remains visible along the northern and eastern arc. A possible entrance survives at the south-west. The field boundary that separates the townland of Clondalever from the neighbouring townland of Taghmon runs about sixty metres to the west, which gives some sense of how the fort sits within a landscape that has been divided and redivided around it over many centuries.