Ringfort (Rath), Brittas, Co. Westmeath

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Brittas, Co. Westmeath

On a gently sloping ridge in County Westmeath, there is a fort that has all but ceased to exist above ground.

What was once a rath, the Irish term for a roughly circular earthwork enclosure used as a farmstead during the early medieval period, now survives only as a faint smudge in a ploughed field. The clearest evidence of its existence comes not from anything a visitor could touch, but from a cropmark, the faint differential growth pattern in crops that reveals buried features beneath the soil, visible in an aerial photograph taken in November 2011.

The 1837 Ordnance Survey Fair Plan map recorded the site as a roughly circular enclosure and annotated it simply as "fort", which tells us it was already being noted as something old and distinct from the working landscape around it. At that time its form was presumably still legible on the ground. What remains today amounts to a sub-circular area of approximately 32 metres north to south and 34 metres east to west, with a poorly preserved bank of earth and stone that survives in any meaningful sense only along the western to north-western arc, where it reaches a maximum height of 0.45 metres and a width of 5.1 metres. Elsewhere it has been reduced to a scarp, a low edge or slope in the ground, barely distinguishable from natural undulation. A field fence running east to west, which also marks the townland boundary with Knockdrin, cuts across the northern perimeter, a reminder of how later administrative and agricultural boundaries have a habit of overwriting older ones without entirely erasing them.

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Pete F
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