Settlement platform, Rochfort Demesne, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Settlement Sites
On the eastern shoreline of Rochfort Bay, where Lough Ennell laps quietly against the Westmeath landscape, a small rocky platform sits just at the water's edge.
What makes it quietly arresting is not its size, which is modest at roughly 22 metres north to south and 18 metres east to west, but rather the question it poses: is this a natural feature, or did someone reshape it deliberately, long ago, to serve as a place to live or work? The platform's even profile, the large limestone slabs exposed along its margins, and the angular blocks scattered across its surface suggest that human hands may have had a role in forming or enlarging what nature provided.
The site was identified as part of a cluster of rock platforms by Karkov and Ruffing in research published in 1990 and 1991, and was later described in detail by Aidan O'Sullivan in 2004. What they found was essentially ambiguous in the most interesting way: a small, irregular bedrock outcrop that has possibly been enhanced or enlarged, but whose original purpose remains uncertain. The platform would originally have sat about ten metres from the shoreline, meaning the water has crept closer over time, gradually swallowing the margin between the platform and dry land. It does not stand alone in the archaeological record of this stretch of lakeshore. Just 220 metres to the west lies the crannóg at Goose Island, and a mound at Rochfort Demesne sits roughly 350 metres to the southeast. A crannóg, for the unfamiliar, is an artificial or partially artificial island, typically built out into a lake during the early medieval period and used as a defended dwelling place. The proximity of this platform to such a site raises the possibility that the two features were connected in some way, whether functionally or socially, though the evidence stops well short of confirming anything.
The platform sits immediately south of a second rock platform on the same shoreline, the two forming a pair whose relationship to each other is no clearer than their relationship to the wider landscape. What survives is a feature that is easy to overlook, low, weathered, and largely subsumed into the lakeshore environment, but one that carries the faint outline of deliberate human presence.