House - indeterminate date, Milltown, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
House
Inside a ringfort near Milltown in County Westmeath, set on a natural rise with open views across rolling pasture, there is a shallow rectangular depression pressed into the ground.
It measures roughly four metres north to south and three and a half metres east to west, its sides faced with stone, though the masonry is broken in places and no clear entrance survives. What exactly it was, and when it was built, nobody can say with certainty, but it may well be the footprint of a house, a domestic structure that once sat within the enclosure of the fort itself.
Ringforts, the most common archaeological monument in Ireland, were typically built during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries, and functioned as enclosed farmsteads, their circular earthen or stone banks offering protection for a family and their livestock. It was not unusual for structures to be built inside them, and in some cases ringforts continued to be used or reoccupied long after their original construction. At this site, a grass-covered line of wall footings extends in an irregular course from the suspected house site towards the interior of the ringfort bank at the south-east. This appears to have been a partition wall of some kind, suggesting that whoever used the space had divided it internally, though into how many sections, and for what purposes, the ground does not say. The indeterminate date in the site description is an honest admission: without excavation, the structure resists being pinned to any particular century.