Ringfort (Rath), Edmondstown, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Ringforts
In the undulating pasture near Edmondstown in County Westmeath, a concrete silage pit sits roughly where the centre of an ancient ringfort once stood.
It is an arresting image, the mundane requirements of modern farming occupying the heart of a structure that may be well over a thousand years old, and it captures something of the complicated fate that many of Ireland's earthwork monuments have met.
Ringforts, known in Irish as raths, were the most common form of enclosed settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically consisting of a circular bank and external ditch enclosing a domestic area used for housing, storage, and the penning of livestock. This particular example sits on a slight rise and measures roughly 43 metres north to south and 39 metres east to west, making it a reasonably substantial example of the type. Two further ringforts lie within 165 metres to the north and north-west, suggesting this part of Westmeath supported a cluster of early settlement activity. The monument appears on the revised 1913 Ordnance Survey 25-inch map, already partially cut by a roadway to the east. By the time it was formally described in 1970, the site was already heavily disturbed: the bank had been worn from a proper earthwork to little more than a scarp on its interior face, and organic material had been deposited against its outer edge across much of its southern and western arc. No definite trace of a fosse, the external ditch that typically accompanied such banks, survived. The wide gap in the bank at the south, some seven metres across at the top, may preserve the memory of the original entrance, though it is equally possible this too is the result of later interference.
The ringfort remains visible from the air as a tree-lined earthwork, the ring of vegetation outlining the old bank even where the earthwork itself has been compromised. On the ground, cattle have further disturbed the interior, poaching the surface across the raised central area. It is a site that rewards quiet attention rather than obvious spectacle, the outline still legible in the landscape despite everything that has been done to obscure it.