Ringfort, Moyvoughly, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Ringforts
In the flat, damp pastureland of Moyvoughly in County Westmeath, a slight swelling in the ground marks the site of an early medieval ringfort, the kind of enclosed farmstead that once dotted the Irish countryside in their thousands.
What makes this particular example quietly interesting is not its grandeur but its layering: two separate phases of human occupation are legible here within a relatively compact area, one cutting into the other, leaving the landscape as a kind of slow-motion palimpsest.
A ringfort is typically a roughly circular enclosure defined by an earthen bank and, in many cases, an outer ditch, known as a fosse, designed to pen livestock and provide a degree of security around a farmstead. When surveyors described this one in 1971, they recorded a subcircular enclosure roughly 39 metres in diameter, bounded by a low bank and an external fosse. The bank has been worn in places almost to a scarp, partly through the attentions of grazing animals over the centuries, and a causeway on the eastern side, around 3.4 metres wide overall, appears to mark where the original entrance stood. What complicates the picture is the western half of the interior, where a suboval house site sits within the ringfort's footprint. Its own small fosse actually cuts through the fosse of the ringfort, indicating that this structure arrived later, a second occupation reshaping the remains of the first. About 12 metres to the west lies a further rectangular enclosure or house site, adding another element to what is, on the surface, an unremarkable patch of wet field. A Preservation Order was placed on the monument in February 1975, a recognition that even a worn and partially defaced earthwork carries archaeological significance that grazing pressure alone cannot be allowed to settle.