Ringfort (Rath), Davidstown, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Davidstown, Co. Westmeath

On a south-west-facing slope of a low hillock in County Westmeath, an early medieval farmstead has been quietly disappearing from the landscape for the better part of two centuries.

What was once a roughly circular earthwork enclosure, the kind of defended homestead built by farming families across Ireland between roughly the sixth and twelfth centuries, is now little more than a partial arc of earthen bank and a faint smudge of lighter green visible only from the air. A ringfort, or rath, typically consisted of one or more circular banks and ditches enclosing a domestic space, and this example near Davidstown has fared worse than most.

The story of its erosion can be traced with some precision. When the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map was produced in 1837, the site appeared clearly enough as a scarp extending to the south-west of a field boundary. By the time the revised twenty-five-inch edition was published in 1913, it had vanished from the cartographic record entirely, suggesting significant deterioration in the intervening decades. A field inspection carried out in 1970 found the remains still partially legible: a low earthen scarp, reaching about 1.3 metres in height, traceable around the southern and western portions of the circuit, while the northern and eastern quadrants had been levelled to make way for a modern laneway running north-west to south-east. The original entrance cannot now be identified. Within the surviving interior, which rises slightly toward the centre, there are remains of what may be a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber typically used in the early medieval period for food storage or as a place of refuge. Two further monuments lie close by on the same hillside: a burial site roughly 32 metres to the north-east, and another ringfort some 61 metres beyond that, suggesting this was once a well-used and probably well-regarded piece of ground.

Today the most complete view of the site comes not from walking it but from looking down at it. Aerial photography reveals the ringfort as a light green, roughly circular cropmark, the differential growth of vegetation above buried features drawing the old enclosure back into visibility in a way the eye at ground level cannot manage.

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