Ringfort, Cavestown And Rosmead, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Ringforts

Ringfort, Cavestown And Rosmead, Co. Westmeath

Beneath a field on the grounds of a Westmeath estate, an ancient ringfort has been quietly disappearing for centuries.

Above ground, nothing visible remains of what was once a substantial bivallate enclosure, meaning a circular fortified settlement defined by two concentric earthen banks and ditches. What survives instead is a ghostly outline, a cropmark picked up in a Digital Globe aerial photograph taken in November 2011, where differences in soil moisture and vegetation growth betray the buried geometry of the vanished monument.

The ringfort sits on a gentle natural rise some 930 metres to the north-east of Rosmead House, and its story is one of gradual erasure. The 1837 Ordnance Survey Fair Plan map still shows it clearly, a large circular double-banked enclosure marked simply as 'Fort'. The same edition's six-inch map depicts it as a tree-lined feature, and there it begins to look less like an early medieval farmstead and more like an ornamental landscape element, the kind of theatrical antiquity that eighteenth-century landowners occasionally cultivated or co-opted. It appears the ringfort may have been converted into a tree-ring, absorbed into the designed grounds of Rosmead House as a scenic curiosity. By later OS editions it had vanished from the cartographic record entirely, the banks presumably levelled, the ditches filled, the trees perhaps felled in their turn.

The practice was not uncommon among improving landlords of the period, who sometimes found that a circular grove of mature trees, conveniently pre-positioned on a rise, made a pleasing eye-catcher in a landscaped demesne. In this case, the reuse appears to have hastened the monument's physical destruction. The cropmark evidence confirms the double-ditched plan is still legible underground, preserved in the soil long after the earthworks themselves were smoothed away.

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