House - indeterminate date, Adamstown, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
House
Inside a ringfort near Adamstown in County Westmeath, three rectangular stone foundations sit arranged across the enclosed interior in a way that suggests something more than casual settlement.
Two of the structures are pressed against the southern and south-south-western sections of the ringfort's bank, joined to one another by a short, steep scarp running north to south. A third house foundation sits alone to the north. What connects all three is a low, narrow bank of earth and stone, also running north to south, that threads across the interior of the fort between them.
A ringfort, to give the briefest description, is a roughly circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen or stone banks, used throughout early medieval Ireland as a farmstead or small defended settlement. The one at Adamstown is recorded separately as its own monument, and it is within that enclosure that these house foundations were identified. The stone footprints of the two southern structures are conjoined, sharing the scarp as a kind of dividing feature between them, while the interior bank connects the whole arrangement into what reads, at ground level, as a coherent spatial organisation. The date of the houses is not known with certainty, which is itself a quietly telling detail; these foundations do not fit neatly into any firmly dated period, and the site resists easy classification.