Ringfort, Jeffrystown, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Ringforts
In the rolling grassland near Jeffrystown in County Westmeath, a low hillock marks the site of a ringfort that has effectively ceased to exist above ground.
A ringfort, to use the general term, is a roughly circular enclosed farmstead dating typically from the early medieval period, defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches. This one survives only as a cartographic ghost, visible in the historical record but entirely erased from the landscape itself.
The 1837 Ordnance Survey Fair Plan map recorded it clearly: a small, oval-shaped enclosure, annotated simply as a fort, sitting on its modest rise amid the surrounding undulations. By the time the revised 25-inch Ordnance Survey edition was published in 1911, it had already vanished from the mapping. At some point in the intervening seventy-odd years, the monument was levelled, most likely through agricultural clearance of the kind that eliminated thousands of similar earthworks across Ireland during the nineteenth century. Today, no surface trace remains.