Ringfort, Culleen More, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Ringforts
What survives at Culleen More is barely there at all.
A low arc of earthwork curves around a gentle rise in the Westmeath grassland, the remnant of what was once a ringfort, one of the thousands of circular enclosed settlements that Irish farming families built throughout the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. The bank, running from south-east around to the north-west, is so reduced that it reads more as a shadow in the ground than a structure, and a faint external fosse, the shallow ditch that would originally have reinforced the enclosure's boundary, survives in similarly diminished form. Inside the arc, traces of cultivation ridges are still visible, suggesting that the land within the old enclosure was worked at some point after the ringfort itself had fallen out of use or recognition.
What makes the site quietly interesting is not its own condition but its setting within the wider landscape. Two further ringforts survive within a few hundred metres, one roughly two hundred metres to the north-north-east and another about two hundred and fifty metres to the east-south-east. That clustering is not unusual in Irish early medieval archaeology; ringforts tend to appear in groups, reflecting the dispersed farmstead pattern of the period rather than any nucleated village arrangement. At Culleen More, the three sites together hint at a small community of enclosed homesteads occupying this stretch of undulating ground, even if the monument under consideration here has been substantially levelled and offers little to read on its own terms.