Ringfort, Ardmore, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Ringforts
In the pasture to the north-west of Ardmore House in County Westmeath, a ringfort has all but ceased to exist.
A ringfort, for those unfamiliar with the form, is a roughly circular enclosure defined by an earthen bank and ditch, typically dating from the early medieval period and used as a farmstead or place of refuge. This one measures approximately 62 metres north to south and 63 metres east to west, making it a reasonably substantial example. By 1980, however, there was nothing left to see at ground level. The earthworks had been levelled, the defining banks gone, and the site absorbed into the surrounding farmland without any obvious trace.
What makes its earlier presence legible is cartographic evidence. On the 1837 Ordnance Survey Fair Plan map, the site was annotated simply as "Fort", and the six-inch OS map of the same year depicted it as a circular, tree-lined enclosure sitting on a low rise in the landscape. Those trees, shown clearly on nineteenth-century mapping, may themselves have been planted to mark or ornament the feature, a common practice on demesne estates of the period, which is why the site is cautiously described as either a ringfort or a tree-ring, the latter being a later plantation of trees whose circular arrangement can mimic the footprint of a genuine ancient monument. The lands on which it sits were part of the demesne of Ardmore House, suggesting the enclosure was at some point incorporated into a managed estate landscape. Today, the only surviving evidence is a faint curvilinear cropmark, barely visible on aerial photography, where the buried outline of the old enclosure still subtly influences the growth of the grass above it.