Ringfort (Rath), Cummerstown, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Cummerstown, Co. Westmeath

Most Irish ringforts are roughly circular, but the one in the townland of Cummerstown, County Westmeath, is a sub-triangular shape, an unusual geometry for a monument type that was already common across Ireland during the early medieval period.

A rath, as this kind of enclosure is often called, typically consisted of one or more earthen banks surrounding a domestic settlement, serving as much as a marker of status as a means of defence. Here, two concentric banks with an intervening fosse, a ditch dug between them, define an interior space measuring roughly 58 metres northeast to southwest and 36 metres northwest to southeast. The site sits on a slight natural rise in undulating grassland, with a bog beginning just 35 metres to the southwest and Lough Adeel lying 450 metres to the west, a configuration that suggests whoever chose this spot was thinking carefully about both drainage and access to water.

The monument retains some of its original structure, though not evenly. The inner bank has been levelled along its western side, and the outer bank survives only along the southern and southwestern arc. What remains intact is a narrow entrance gap of about one and a half metres wide at the south, with a causeway crossing the fosse at three and a half metres wide and half a metre high, enough to suggest a deliberately managed threshold rather than a casual gap. Inside, the ground rises slightly toward the centre, and faint traces of cultivation ridges survive, indicating that at some point after the enclosure ceased to function as a settlement, the interior was put to agricultural use. Two field fences, both post-dating the first Ordnance Survey of the 1830s, now cut across the monument from different directions, quietly parcelling up something that predates them by well over a thousand years.

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