These are the kinds of remains that reward careful looking: not dramatic enough to catch the eye from a distance, but precise and telling once you know what you are seeing.

A ringfort, for those unfamiliar with the term, is a roughly circular enclosed settlement of the early medieval period, typically defined by an earthen bank and ditch, and used as a farmstead. They are common across Ireland, but the survival of domestic structures inside them is far less usual. Here, set on a slight but prominent natural rise in gently undulating Westmeath pasture, the ringfort contains a pair of conjoined hut sites positioned at its centre. The larger of the two lies to the east, a circular area of about 4.4 metres in diameter, defined by the low remains of a bank roughly 1.5 metres wide and 0.3 metres high, with a 2-metre entrance facing east. Beside it, sharing a wall or at least a boundary, is a smaller circular structure of about 2.3 metres across, similarly defined by a slight bank of the same dimensions, though no entrance is now visible in what remains. The two structures together would have been modest even by the standards of their time, and their scale gives a useful sense of the intimacy of early medieval domestic life, two people, perhaps, or a person and their animals, sheltering in adjacent spaces within a defended enclosure.