Ringfort, Kilmaglish, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Ringforts
The most telling thing about this site in the townland of Kilmaglish is what is no longer there.
A ringfort, the type of circular earthwork enclosure built in early medieval Ireland as a farmstead and family residence, once occupied this field in County Westmeath. Today the ground shows nothing. No bank, no ditch, no trace of the structure that once sat here. It survives only as a memory preserved in cartography.
The evidence for its existence comes from the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, published in 1837, which recorded the site as a circular enclosure. That early map also shows a townland boundary running roughly east to west, intersecting the ringfort at its northern edge, suggesting the enclosure was already a fixed enough landmark to be used as a reference point when the administrative geography of the area was being formalised. By the time revised editions of the OS six-inch maps were produced, neither the ringfort nor the boundary line appeared on the field in question. The public road to the north had by then taken over the function of marking the old townland boundary, quietly absorbing and erasing the earlier landscape in a single cartographic revision. The fort itself had been levelled, most likely through agricultural improvement, a process that claimed enormous numbers of such earthworks across Ireland during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.