Ringfort (Rath), Culleenabohoge, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Ringforts
A circular patch of grass in a Westmeath field is all that remains of what was once a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, those enclosed farmsteads of earthen banks and ditches that once numbered in the tens of thousands across Ireland and formed the basic unit of early medieval rural life.
This particular example, at the base of a north-facing slope of a steep hill in Culleenabohoge, has been levelled so completely that it is no longer readable as an earthwork at all. Its roughly 35-metre diameter is now legible only in the way the vegetation grows differently across the buried ground, the classic signature of a site that has been ploughed or disturbed into near-invisibility.
The fort was already recorded on the 1837 Ordnance Survey Fair Plan map, where it appears as a circular enclosure with the annotation 'fort', suggesting it was still recognisable as an upstanding feature at that point. At some stage after that, it was levelled, and the interior was cultivated; faint traces of cultivation ridges aligned east to west are still detectable across the sloping ground, which falls away from south-west to north-east. A modern field fence now runs diagonally through the site on a north-east to south-west line, bisecting what was once a coherent enclosed space. A second ringfort sits approximately 90 metres to the south, a reminder that these structures were rarely isolated; paired or clustered raths are common across the Irish midlands, sometimes reflecting family groupings or successive generations farming the same landscape. By November 2011, aerial photography captured the buried monument as a cropmark, the dry or growing seasons drawing the outline of the old banks back to the surface in the differential growth of whatever was planted above them.