Ringfort, Cavestown And Rosmead, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Ringforts
In the reclaimed grasslands between Cavestown and Rosmead in County Westmeath, there is a ringfort that exists now only on paper.
A ringfort, for those unfamiliar with the term, is a roughly circular enclosed settlement, typically defined by an earthen bank and ditch, and they were built in their thousands across Ireland during the early medieval period. This one, however, has vanished so completely that no surface trace of it remains today.
The 1837 Ordnance Survey Fair Plan map registered only its eastern half, annotating the feature simply as a "Fort". The OS six-inch map from the same year showed a semi-circular arc of enclosure surviving along the north-east, east, south, and south-west. By the time later editions of the six-inch maps were produced, the monument had disappeared from the record entirely, presumably levelled in the intervening years as the surrounding land was drained and brought into agricultural use. The bog that still lies some fifty metres to the east hints at the kind of wet, marginal terrain this ringfort once occupied, the sort of ground that would have been gradually reclaimed over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as farmers pushed outward from more workable soils.