Ringfort (Rath), Curraghmore, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Ringforts
A slight rise in a Westmeath pasture, overlooking a pond to the east, holds a ringfort that has quietly outlasted the people who built it by more than a thousand years.
What makes it quietly arresting is not dramatic scale but rather its completeness as a trace: a near-circular earthen enclosure, roughly 23 metres across, still legible in the landscape despite centuries of agricultural activity around and even within it. Ringforts, known in Irish as raths when formed from earthen banks rather than stone, were the typical farmstead enclosures of early medieval Ireland, generally dating from around the fifth to the twelfth centuries. Most housed a single family and their livestock, the surrounding bank offering a degree of security and marking out a domestic territory.
This particular example was recorded on the revised 1913 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map as a circular earthwork, and when it was described in detail in 1970 the bank measured roughly 3.6 metres wide at its base, narrowing to about 0.8 metres at the top, with no visible fosse, the defensive ditch that typically accompanies such a bank, surviving around it. A gap in the northeast quadrant, where the bank drops noticeably on both its inner and outer faces, has been interpreted as a possible original entrance. Inside, the ground slopes gently toward the northwest, and faint cultivation ridges are still visible across the interior, suggesting the enclosed space was put to agricultural use at some point after the rath's primary occupation. From the air, the monument appears as a tree-lined circular earthwork, the ring of vegetation now doing some of the work the bank once did in marking out the enclosure against the surrounding fields.