Ringfort (Rath), Culleen Beg, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Ringforts
On a low rise in the undulating pasture of Culleen Beg, the ground holds the faint outline of an enclosure that predates every field boundary around it.
The earthwork is small, roughly twenty metres across at its widest, and its southern and eastern edges have been eaten away by quarrying at some point in its long afterlife. What remains is a partial bank, traceable from the west around through the north to the northeast, curving in the manner characteristic of a ringfort, the circular or oval embanked enclosure that served as a farmstead and defended homestead for much of early medieval Ireland. Thousands of these survive in varying states across the country; this one in Westmeath sits quietly at 106 metres above sea level, its interior now lost beneath dense vegetation.
The site was already being recorded when the first Ordnance Survey six-inch maps were produced in 1837, which annotated it simply as a circular earthwork and noted it as a "Fort" on the accompanying Fair Plan Map. By the time the revised twenty-five-inch edition was produced in 1913, the monument had been reduced to a spot height marker, suggesting its cultural significance had receded in the cartographic imagination even as the landscape around it changed. A field description from 1980 captured the state that is broadly recognisable today: a partially surviving bank, a sharply falling interior, and a wide grassy depression to the south and southeast that is likely a backfilled quarry. The quarrying has obscured what would once have been the most legible part of the enclosure, and aerial photography shows the remaining earthwork as a partially tree-planted form, the planted trees themselves a mark of twentieth-century land management layered over something considerably older.