Ringfort (Rath), Creggstown, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Ringforts
A ringfort sits on a gentle rise in County Westmeath's pasture land, its enclosing bank worn down to little more than a low scarp on one side and ploughed almost flat on another.
What survives is uneven and partial, yet the site's position still does exactly what it was designed to do: offer clear sightlines across the surrounding countryside in every direction. That quality of surveillance, built in by whoever raised this earthwork perhaps well over a thousand years ago, is still legible in the landscape today.
Ringforts, known in Irish as raths when formed from earthen banks rather than stone, were the standard farmstead enclosure of early medieval Ireland, typically dating from roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries. They enclosed a homestead and its immediate buildings, the surrounding bank and, usually, an outer ditch called a fosse providing a degree of security and a boundary marker. The Creggstown example was formally described in 1970 as an oval measuring approximately 20 metres across in both its main axes. At that point the bank was best preserved along the southern, western, and northern arc, while ploughing had reduced the north-northeast to east-northeast section considerably. The eastern portion had been partly quarried away, leaving what remained as a scarp standing roughly 1.6 metres high. No definite trace of a fosse or an original entrance feature was identifiable. The interior ground is uneven, marked by slight natural humps and hollows rather than any clear structural remains.