Ringfort (Rath), Ardmore, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Ardmore, Co. Westmeath

What you are looking at, when you stand beside this low earthwork in Ardmore, Co. Westmeath, is the remnant of a domestic enclosure whose original entrance has been entirely lost.

A ringfort, or rath, is a roughly circular enclosed farmstead of the early medieval period, typically defended by one or more earthen banks with a ditch, called a fosse, cut between them. This one sits on a gentle rise in undulating pasture, with open views in every direction, which is precisely the kind of position early farmers chose: visible, defensible in a modest way, and useful for keeping an eye on livestock and approaching visitors alike.

When a description was made in 1970, the monument measured approximately 22 metres across, roughly oval in plan, and retained a layered system of defence: an inner bank, an intervening fosse, and an outer bank. The outer bank still stands to about 2.5 metres on its exterior face across much of its circuit, though the northern section of the inner bank has been damaged. Inside, the ground rises slightly towards the centre, where the traces of a hut site survive, and faint cultivation ridges running north-east to south-west suggest the interior was at some point turned over to agricultural use, probably long after the enclosure had ceased to function as a settlement. The earthwork appeared on the revised Ordnance Survey 25-inch map of 1913, already a landscape feature old enough to be recorded rather than explained. It was placed on the Register of Historic Monuments on 5 February 1975, with the notice published in Iris Oifiguiúl on 11 February of that year.

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