Ringfort, Rahadorrish, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Ringforts
Some places are most legible from the air.
On a slight north-north-west-facing slope in County Westmeath, a ringfort that has long since vanished from ground level still leaves its impression on the land, visible only as a D-shaped cropmark when photographed from above. Cropmarks form when buried structures affect the growth of whatever is planted over them, with ditches and banks producing subtle variations in colour and height that become readable in dry summers, when the soil is under stress. What was once a defined enclosure with an external fosse, the shallow ditch that would have ringed the outer edge of the earthwork, now survives in precisely this ghostly form.
Ordnance Survey mapping from 1837 recorded the site as a D-shaped, tree-lined enclosure, its straight side running to the west-north-west, with a field boundary extending northward. It was annotated simply as "fort" on the OS Fair plan of that year, which reflects the common local use of the word for ringforts, the circular or near-circular enclosed settlements that were built across Ireland largely during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. By the time the revised twenty-five-inch OS map was produced in 1913, the enclosure was still legible as an earthwork, with a roughly curvilinear element running from north around through east and south to west, and a fosse traceable from the south-east around to the west. Sometime between that survey and 1980, when the site was formally described, the monument was levelled entirely, leaving no surface remains visible to anyone walking the pasture.
