Ringfort (Rath), Sionhill, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Ringforts
On a west-facing ridge in County Westmeath, a low oval earthwork sits in open pasture, its banks worn down by centuries of weather and agricultural use to little more than grass-covered swells in the ground.
What was once a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead typically dating from the early medieval period, roughly 500 to 1200 AD, and once defended by a bank and an outer ditch, has been reduced over time to something far quieter and harder to read.
The site was recorded on the revised 1913 edition of the Ordnance Survey 25-inch map as a subcircular earthwork, and by 1998 surveyors were measuring an oval enclosure of about 19.7 metres east to west and 15.5 metres north to south. The earthen bank survives in varying condition around the perimeter; to the north and west it stands between 0.45 and 0.7 metres high, while to the south and east it has been reduced considerably, in places barely rising above the surrounding ground. Two gaps interrupt the bank, one of about 1.4 metres at the east-south-east and a much wider opening of 7 metres at the south-west, the latter likely the original entrance or a later breach. A 1970 field description noted a deep U-shaped fosse, the term for the external ditch that would have encircled the bank, still visible along the eastern and southern arc. By 1998 that fosse had disappeared entirely, absorbed back into the slope. The interior tilts gently eastward. Seen from aerial photography, the whole thing takes on the outline of a plectrum, an unexpectedly precise modern analogy for something so old.