Ringfort, Johnstown, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Ringforts
There is a ringfort in Johnstown, County Westmeath, that cannot be seen.
No earthwork survives, no bank or ditch breaks the surface of the field, and a visitor standing on the spot would have no reason to suspect anything was there at all. Yet the site is real enough, its oval outline preserved in a faint crop mark that showed up on an aerial photograph taken in November 2011, the buried archaeology still influencing what grows above it, even if the monument itself was long ago levelled.
Ringforts are the most common archaeological monument type in Ireland, typically consisting of a circular or oval area enclosed by one or more earthen banks, and used during the early medieval period as farmsteads or places of settlement. This particular example sat on a slight rise on the north-western face of a prominent hill, positioned to command extensive views across the landscape to the north-west, north, and north-east, an orientation that suggests its builders were attentive to the terrain. It was recorded on the 1837 Ordnance Survey Fair Plan map as an oval-shaped enclosure, annotated simply as a fort, with approximate dimensions of 36 metres north to south and 30 metres east to west. That cartographic record is now among the clearest evidence of what once existed here, the monument having been levelled at some point between its mapping in the nineteenth century and the present day.