Ringfort (Rath), Boardsland, Co. Westmeath

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Boardsland, Co. Westmeath

On a gentle swell of pasture in County Westmeath, a shallow ring in the ground marks what was once a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, a circular enclosed farmstead typically built during the early medieval period, between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries.

What makes this one quietly interesting is how thoroughly the landscape has absorbed it. The enclosing bank, originally of earth and stone, has been reduced in most places to little more than a scarp, a barely perceptible slope in the grass. Only along the eastern side does a remnant survive with any real presence, and only because it was incorporated long ago into a field boundary, the agricultural needs of a later era accidentally preserving what time and quarrying had otherwise worn away.

When surveyors described the site in 1971 and again in 1976, they recorded a roughly subcircular enclosure approximately thirty metres from north to south and twenty-eight metres from east to west. By that point the monument was already considerably diminished. Quarrying had eaten into the perimeter from the north-west around to the north-east, and a field bank imposed by later farming cuts across the western side entirely. Inside the enclosure, the ground still carries old cultivation ridges running north to south, evidence that the interior was worked as agricultural land at some point after the ringfort's original use had ended. These ridges are one of the more legible details left to read in the site, physical traces of generations of ordinary use layered on top of one another across the centuries.

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Pete F
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