Ringfort (Rath), Cloran And Corcullentry, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Ringforts
There is almost nothing left to see at this ringfort in Counties Westmeath, and yet the site persists in the landscape in its own quiet way.
A ringfort, or rath, is an enclosed farmstead of the early medieval period, typically circular and defined by an earthen bank and a surrounding ditch called a fosse. Here, both features survive only poorly: the bank has been largely levelled, the fosse is slight, and a field fence and drain, installed sometime after 1837, cut across the eastern side of the enclosure. What the ground no longer clearly shows, however, the sky can still read. A crop mark visible on a Digital Globe aerial photograph taken in November 2011 reveals the buried outline of the monument, the differential growth of vegetation above the compressed soil betraying the circular form beneath.
The rath sits on a gentle natural rise in gently undulating grassland, with the Cloran Loughs lying around 140 metres to the north-west. The enclosed area is sub-circular, measuring approximately 52 metres north to south and 50 metres east to west, placing it within the typical size range for a single-family farming enclosure of the early medieval period. Inside the bank, the ground carries traces of cultivation ridges, the low parallel earthworks left by historic ploughing or lazy-bed agriculture. These ridges post-date the ringfort's primary use, indicating that at some point the interior was turned over to tillage, likely one of the processes that contributed to the gradual erosion of the surrounding bank. The levelling of such sites has been a common fate across the Irish midlands, where intensive agriculture has slowly worn away monuments that once defined the organisation of the rural landscape.