Ringfort, Curraghbane, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Ringforts
At Curraghbane in County Westmeath, there is a ringfort that no longer really exists above ground, yet refuses to disappear entirely.
Ringforts, the circular enclosures that once served as farmsteads and homesteads across early medieval Ireland, typically survive as earthen banks and ditches. This one has been levelled, its banks long since pushed flat into the surrounding pasture, but the outline persists as a faint discolouration in the grass, a light green band roughly two and a half metres wide tracing an oval shape across the slope. It is the kind of presence that a casual walker would pass without a second thought, and that aerial photography makes suddenly legible.
The site sits on a gentle north-north-east-facing slope with open views stretching to the west and north, the sort of position that would have made practical sense to whoever built here. It was already notable enough in the nineteenth century to be marked simply as "Fort" on the 1837 Ordnance Survey Fair Plan Map, suggesting it was still a recognisable feature in the landscape at that point. By 1971, when it was formally described, the monument had been levelled, its oval outline measuring around thirty metres from east-north-east to west-south-west and nineteen metres across the shorter axis. The pale green band encircling the interior most likely represents the line of a backfilled fosse, the defensive ditch that would originally have ringed the enclosure. No trace of an entrance survives, or at least none was visible at ground level. What remains is essentially a ghost, legible mainly from above, where aerial photographs still show the outline of the original structure pressed faintly into the field.