Ringfort, Kilpatrick, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Ringforts
Some places are remarkable precisely because there is nothing left to see.
On a low hillock at the base of a south-west facing slope in County Westmeath, a ringfort once occupied a modest but deliberate position in the landscape, with marshy ground lying roughly sixty metres to the south and another ringfort sitting just 130 metres to the north-north-east. Today, no surface trace of it survives at all.
Ringforts, roughly circular or oval enclosures defined by earthen banks and ditches, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically serving as farmsteads for a single family and their livestock. This particular example had an unusual form: the 1837 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map shows it as a D-shaped enclosure, with one straight side running along the south-west and field boundaries extending from its north-north-east and western edges. That distinctive outline suggests the monument was already being absorbed into the working agricultural landscape even as the cartographers recorded it. By the time the revised twenty-five-inch Ordnance Survey map was produced in 1911, the site had disappeared from the record entirely, indicating that it was levelled sometime in the intervening decades, most likely cleared to make way for more productive farmland during a period of significant agricultural reorganisation across rural Ireland.