Ringfort (Rath), Culleen More, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Ringforts
In the low pasture of Culleen More, a ring of trees marks the outline of a ringfort that has spent the better part of a century being quietly dismantled by agricultural life.
A ringfort, or rath, is an enclosed circular earthwork, typically dating from the early medieval period, defined by a raised bank and an outer ditch called a fosse. This one, roughly 24 metres in diameter, survives as a platform edged by a steep scarp face, but its interior tells a different story: a concrete silo pit has been cut down through the southern half of the monument, the spoil heaped to one side, and a tractor path has been worn along the upper edge of the scarp, lowering it considerably from the north-west around to the south-east. A ramp has been pushed into the interior at the west-north-west. What the original entrance looked like, and where it sat, is no longer legible.
The earliest cartographic record of the site appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1837, where it is shown as a circular, tree-lined earthwork, with a field boundary running to its south-west that appears to respect the monument's presence. By the time the revised twenty-five-inch map was produced in 1913, the shape had already shifted slightly, recorded as roughly oval rather than circular. A survey carried out in 1970 found a platform still defined by its scarp, standing about 1.8 metres high on the less disturbed southern and western side, with faint traces of a fosse surviving at the base. One question the 1970 description could not resolve was whether the platform represented an artificially raised centre or whether the earthwork had simply been built on a natural rise in the ground. That ambiguity remains. A second ringfort lies approximately 140 metres to the south-west, suggesting this was once a landscape with more than one such enclosure in close proximity, a pattern not unusual in Ireland's early medieval countryside.