Ringfort (Rath), Dunnamona, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Dunnamona, Co. Westmeath

In a field in Dunnamona, County Westmeath, a roughly circular earthwork sits quietly beneath a cover of trees, its double ramparts still legible in the landscape despite centuries of neglect and encroaching vegetation.

It is the kind of site that registers as a slight thickening of the hedgerow from a distance, and as something more deliberate only once you begin to look.

The earthwork is a bi-vallate ringfort, meaning it is enclosed not by a single bank and ditch but by two concentric banks with a fosse, or ditch, running between them. This doubled arrangement was less common than the standard single-bank rath and is generally taken to indicate a settlement of some status, though whether that reflects the wealth of a particular family, a need for additional defence, or local custom is rarely easy to determine at any given site. The enclosure measures approximately 45 metres in diameter. What makes this particular example quietly unusual is that it appears to have attracted almost no documentary attention: it carries no archival file and seems to have surfaced as a formally recorded site only through analysis of satellite imagery captured between 2011 and 2013, when orbital photography sharp enough to resolve earthwork relief became widely available to researchers working at a desk rather than in a field.

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