Ringfort, Kilpatrick, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Ringforts

Ringfort, Kilpatrick, Co. Westmeath

On the western slope of a low hill in County Westmeath, there is almost nothing left to see.

That near-absence is, in its own way, the point. What survives of this ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead common across early medieval Ireland, amounts to a faint earthen bank, barely half a metre high and less than two metres wide, tracing a circle of roughly sixteen metres across reclaimed grassland. A gap on the eastern side, about two and a half metres wide, may once have been the entrance through which people and livestock passed, though it takes some effort of imagination to read it that way now.

The monument was still legible enough in 1837 to be recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map as a small circular earthwork and annotated as a fort on the OS Fair plan map of the same period. By the time the twenty-five-inch edition was surveyed for its 1911 publication, it had disappeared from the record entirely, suggesting the enclosure was levelled sometime in the intervening decades, most likely cleared for agricultural improvement. It sits on a slight rise of reclaimed grassland, with marshland roughly 170 metres to the south-west and a second, better-preserved ringfort about 165 metres to the north-north-east, a proximity that hints at a settled, organised early medieval landscape now largely erased by drainage and cultivation.

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Pete F
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