Hut site, Tullystown, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Settlement Sites
Beneath the hazel scrub and briars on a ridge in County Westmeath, the footings of a rectangular house sit quietly inside an ancient enclosure, largely invisible and largely forgotten.
The site is a platform-type ringfort, a form of enclosed settlement in which the interior was deliberately raised above the surrounding ground level, and inside it the grass-covered wall foundations of a dwelling can still be traced: nine and a half metres long internally, three and a half metres wide, oriented roughly east-north-east to west-south-west. Those proportions suggest a narrow, hall-like structure, the kind of domestic space that would have served an early medieval household.
The ringfort sits on top of a ridge running north-west to south-east, set within an undulating stretch of countryside. It is not alone in this landscape: a second ringfort lies approximately ninety metres to the north-east, a proximity that hints at a clustered pattern of early settlement rather than a single isolated farmstead. Ringforts, sometimes called raths when they have earthen rather than stone banks, were the typical enclosed farmsteads of early medieval Ireland, built and occupied broadly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. This one is now so overgrown with hazel and briars that any close examination of its structure is effectively impossible, leaving the wall footings of the interior building as the most legible surviving feature.