Ringfort (Rath), Mylestown, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Ringforts
At the foot of a low hillock in County Westmeath, a ringfort sits in open pasture in a state of quiet diminishment.
What was once a complete circular enclosure is now partly missing, its south-eastern quadrant eaten away by quarrying at some point in the past, and today the monument barely registers on aerial photography, visible only as a faint cropmark where the soil above buried features responds differently to dry conditions.
When it was formally described in the early 1970s, the site measured roughly 30 metres across its north-east to south-west axis and 28 metres on the north-west to south-east axis, making it a modestly sized example of a rath. A rath is the earthwork form of an Irish ringfort, the type of enclosed farmstead that was the standard unit of rural settlement throughout early medieval Ireland, typically dated to the period between the sixth and tenth centuries. This one was defined by a bank and an external fosse, the fosse being a ditch dug to provide material for the bank and to reinforce the boundary. The bank survives with a base width of 4.5 metres and an external height of about 1.8 metres, though its interior face has been considerably flattened, rising only around 0.2 metres above the enclosed ground. The fosse itself is only faintly traceable along the northern arc, from west-north-west round to north. The interior slopes gently toward the south-west, and the good views the site commands across the surrounding landscape to the south and south-east hint at the practical logic behind choosing this particular spot, even at the base of a rise rather than its summit.