Ringfort (Rath), Davidstown, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Ringforts
Beneath a ploughed field in Davidstown, Co. Westmeath, lies what was once one of three ringforts clustered within a few hundred metres of each other on gently rolling ground.
The site is gone now, levelled sometime between 1970 and 1974 during land reclamation works. Nothing is visible at ground level. The only evidence that anything was ever there comes from aerial photography, where the outline of the old earthwork shows up as an oval-shaped cropmark, the soil above the buried ditches and banks colouring the crops differently from the surrounding field, a ghostly signature of a structure that took early medieval farmers considerable effort to build and someone in the early 1970s only a few days to erase.
A ringfort, sometimes called a rath, is the most common monument type in the Irish landscape: a roughly circular enclosure defined by an earthen bank and external ditch, used during the early medieval period as a farmstead and the focus of family life. The Davidstown example was recorded in some detail as recently as 1970, when it still stood as a roughly circular earthwork approximately 26 metres in diameter, enclosed by a poorly preserved bank with traces of an outer fosse, the shallow defensive ditch typical of the form. A broad causeway, six metres wide, crossed the fosse at the north-east, though no corresponding entrance gap survived in the bank itself. The interior sloped gently eastward and retained faint traces of cultivation ridges. By 1974 it was described as having been recently levelled. During the clearance works, local accounts record that a skeleton was uncovered, apparently in a sitting position, a burial posture associated with various periods of Irish prehistory and early history. No further detail about the find appears to have been documented. The 1837 Ordnance Survey map had already shown a quarried depression adjoining the site to the south-south-west, and the 1913 revision depicted a limekiln, a structure used for burning limestone to produce agricultural lime, immediately to the west, suggesting the land around the ringfort had been in active agricultural use and gradual modification for well over a century before the final levelling. Two further ringforts survive in the immediate vicinity, one roughly 110 metres to the north-west and another about 115 metres to the south-east, suggesting this was once a settled and organised agricultural landscape rather than an isolated farmstead.