Ringfort (Rath), Drumraney, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Ringforts
A modern road cuts straight through an early medieval enclosure in the pastureland of Drumraney, Co. Westmeath, and neither the road nor the enclosure draws much attention.
The earthen bank that once enclosed this rath, a type of ringfort formed from a raised circular earthwork rather than stone, survives on most of its circuit, but the eastern sector has been sliced away by a road running northeast to southwest. The bank itself is broad and low, and there is no visible fosse, the external ditch that typically accompanied such enclosures, nor any surviving trace of an original entrance. The whole thing is easy to miss, which is perhaps why it does not appear on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1837 or the twenty-five-inch edition of 1913.
When surveyors described the monument in 1976 and again in 1978, they recorded a roughly circular area approximately 33 metres in diameter, sitting on a gentle west-facing slope with open views to the north and east and more restricted sightlines to the west. Ringforts of this kind were typically built during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries, and served as enclosed farmsteads for farming families of varying social rank. The absence of any fosse at Drumraney may reflect either the original construction method or centuries of agricultural wear. That the site went unrecorded on both nineteenth and early twentieth-century maps suggests it had already faded considerably into the landscape by the time systematic surveying began.
