Ringfort (Rath), Clonyn, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Clonyn, Co. Westmeath

On the demesne lands of Clonyn Castle in County Westmeath, a low glacial hillock rises just enough above the surrounding grassland to have made it worth enclosing, probably well over a thousand years ago.

What survives today is a roughly oval earthwork, measuring approximately 40 metres north to south and 45 metres east to west, defined by an earthen bank and the traces of an external fosse. A fosse is simply a defensive ditch dug around an enclosure, and this one would originally have reinforced the bank to create a clearly bounded space. Earthworks of this type, known as ringforts or raths, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically serving as enclosed farmsteads for a single family or small community. A stream runs immediately to the south, which is the kind of practical detail that would have mattered greatly to whoever chose the spot.

The site sits in an interesting administrative ambiguity that cartographic history has quietly preserved. On the six-inch Ordnance Survey map of 1837, this earthwork falls within the small townland of Clonagapple, with that same southern stream marking the townland's boundary. On later editions of the OS maps, however, the monument appears to have shifted, at least on paper, into the neighbouring townland of Clonyn. The earthwork itself did not move, of course; the boundary did, or the cartography was simply revised. A post-1700 field boundary cuts across the fosse at the north-northeast, which means that at some point after the early eighteenth century, agricultural reorganisation of the land took little account of what was already there. The ringfort now sits in the southern quarter of a small rectangular field, itself a post-1700 creation, the older monument absorbed quietly into a later agricultural landscape roughly 800 metres northeast of Clonyn Castle.

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