Ringfort (Rath), Rathconnell, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Ringforts
On the northern slope of a gentle rise in County Westmeath, a ringfort has all but disappeared into the pasture, surviving not as an earthwork you could walk around and touch but as a colour.
Aerial photography picks it up as a dark-green, suboval patch against the surrounding grass, the outline of what was once an enclosed farmstead betrayed only by the richer growth of vegetation above its buried remains. That differential greening follows the line of the old fosse, a defensive ditch that once ringed the interior, now backfilled and invisible to anyone standing in the field.
Ringforts, sometimes called raths, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically consisting of a circular or oval area enclosed by one or more earthen banks and ditches. Thousands survive across the country in varying states of preservation; this one, unfortunately, did not fare well. When it was recorded in 1984, it had already been ploughed out to the point where only a slight arc of the original inner bank remained, running from the south-west around to the west-north-west, a low remnant just thirty-five centimetres high and four metres wide. The original entrance was no longer identifiable. Maps tell part of the story of its gradual erasure: the 1837 Ordnance Survey six-inch edition depicted it as a clear oval earthwork, while the revised 1913 twenty-five-inch edition showed a more ambiguous, modified outline, suggesting that agricultural pressure had already been at work for decades before the monument was effectively levelled. At roughly 41.5 metres in diameter, it would have been a reasonably substantial enclosure in its time, occupying a position with open views to the north, east, and south-west.