Ringfort (Rath), Davidstown, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Ringforts
On a low rise in the undulating pasture of County Westmeath, a roughly oval earthwork sits quietly in the landscape, its tree-lined profile visible from aerial photography and its enclosing bank still substantial enough to read clearly on the ground.
What makes it quietly unusual is not just its own survival but its neighbourhood: within roughly sixty metres to the south-west lies another ringfort, and closer still, at about thirty-two metres, a burial site. This clustering of early medieval monuments is a reminder that these features were rarely isolated; the Irish countryside was once organised around such focal points in ways that modern field boundaries only partially obscure.
A ringfort, sometimes called a rath, is an enclosed farmstead of the early medieval period, typically defined by one or more earthen banks and an external ditch, or fosse, designed to protect livestock and household. The Davidstown example measures approximately fifty-six metres on its longer north-east to south-west axis and forty metres across. It appears on the 1837 Ordnance Survey six-inch map already as a recognisable oval earthwork, with field boundaries radiating from its western and northern sides, suggesting the surrounding farmland had long been organised around it. By the time of the revised 1913 twenty-five-inch edition, those boundaries had multiplied and modified the monument further. A survey carried out in 1970 recorded the structure in considerable detail: the earthen bank is best preserved along the north-east to south arc, though its outer face shows signs of deliberate steepening at some point. A wide gap in the inner bank on the south-south-west side, roughly four and a half metres across at the top and flanked on each side by a large stone set upright as a revetment, is thought to represent the original entrance. Outside the bank, the fosse is clearly visible along much of its circuit, though it is almost entirely infilled on the eastern side. At the south-south-west, where the fosse is also infilled, the raised ground may once have served as a causeway approach to that entrance. Within the interior, a house site has been recorded, a common find inside ringforts, where the enclosed space would have sheltered a dwelling and its associated yard.
The monument sits on ground with good views in all directions, a characteristic that was almost certainly deliberate in its original siting. ESB poles and a modern stone wall have encroached on the western side, and field boundaries cut across the monument at the north-north-east and south, but enough of the bank and fosse survives to give a strong sense of the original enclosure. The tree growth that now marks its outline, visible from above, is itself a common fate for ringforts in Ireland, where the slight rise and undisturbed soil of the bank often encourages scrub and hedgerow to take hold along the circuit.