Ringfort (Rath), Coolaleena, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Coolaleena, Co. Westmeath

Half of a ringfort is, technically, still a ringfort, though the Coolaleena example in County Westmeath has spent the better part of two centuries quietly becoming something else.

What was once a complete circular enclosure, the kind of raised earthen ring that early medieval Irish farmers built around their homesteads from roughly the fifth century onwards, has been reduced on one side to little more than a low scar in the ground. The surviving half, running from the south-southwest around through the west and north to the northeast, now does double duty as a field boundary, folded into the working landscape so thoroughly that the agricultural and the archaeological have become difficult to separate.

The 1837 Ordnance Survey Fair Plan map recorded the site as it existed in the early nineteenth century: a circular enclosure with trees dotted around the perimeter, labelled simply as "fort". That label reflects a long-standing folk awareness of such features, which were commonly called raths or fairy forts and generally left alone out of a mixture of respect and unease. At some point after 1837, the northeastern through to the south-southwestern arc of the enclosing bank was levelled, leaving the remaining earthen bank to mark out a rough semicircle with an approximate diameter of twenty-four metres on the northwest to southeast axis. The site sits on a gentle rise in undulating grassland, and a second ringfort lies approximately 190 metres to the northeast, suggesting this was once a landscape with a notable concentration of early settlement activity.

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