Ringfort (Rath), Davidstown, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Davidstown, Co. Westmeath

On a gentle slope in County Westmeath, an ancient earthwork has been quietly absorbed into the landscape around it, its banks serving as field boundaries for so long that the boundary between monument and farm infrastructure has become genuinely difficult to untangle.

This is not unusual for ringforts, the circular or near-circular enclosed settlements that were built across Ireland, mostly during the early medieval period, as farmsteads for single family groups. What makes this particular example quietly interesting is the degree to which it has shifted shape on paper across the centuries, and what that shifting reveals about how the land has been worked.

The Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1837 records it as a D-shaped earthwork, roughly 25 metres along its straight side, incorporated into the field boundary system of the time. By the revised twenty-five-inch map of 1913, that same enclosure had become a modified rectangular shape, now measuring approximately 35 metres by 25 metres, still defined by field boundaries to the south-west and north-west. When the site was examined on the ground in 1970, surveyors found a much disturbed roughly rectangular area enclosed by an earthen bank and a modern stone wall. The bank survives most clearly along the northern and eastern arcs, standing as a scarp about 1.5 metres high along the eastern to southern stretch. Along the southern and western sides, the outer face had been steepened in relatively modern times and fitted with stone facing where it was incorporated into a field fence. No original entrance is visible. Inside, there are faint traces of cultivation ridges running roughly north-north-west to south-south-east, and a large stone protrudes from the surface in the western quadrant. A second ringfort lies approximately 115 metres to the north-west, suggesting this was once a more densely settled corner of the parish than the present pasture might suggest.

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