Ringfort (Rath), Curraghbrack, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Curraghbrack, Co. Westmeath

On a gentle rise in the pastureland of Curraghbrack, a roughly oval earthwork sits in a field that has been quietly absorbing it for centuries.

The enclosure measures about 34 metres east to west and 33 metres north to south, and what survives is a bank reduced in many places to little more than a low scarp, its original form worn away by time, grazing, and the practical demands of farming. A ring of trees now marks its outline on aerial photography, giving the site a ghostly legibility from above that it largely lacks at ground level.

A rath is the Irish term for a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead built throughout Ireland from roughly the early medieval period. Thousands survive across the country in varying states of preservation, and this one in Westmeath illustrates how fragile that survival can be. The Ordnance Survey mapped it as a clear oval earthwork as early as 1837, but by the time of the revised 25-inch map in 1913, sections of the bank on the north and north-west had already been incorporated into field boundaries, the ancient enclosure pressed into service as a convenient property line. When the monument was described in 1970, the bank was fragmentary throughout, with traces of an outer fosse, the ditch that once ran around the outside of the enclosure, still faintly visible in places. Two small quarried depressions in the eastern bank suggest the material was at some point removed and put to use elsewhere on the farm. The interior, which rises from the perimeter towards the centre, still carries faint traces of cultivation ridges running roughly north-north-west to south-south-east, a reminder that the enclosed space itself was farmed long after any early medieval use had been forgotten. Modern fencing and a trackway have since added further interruptions to what remains of the original bank, and the original entrance is no longer recognisable.

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