Ringfort (Rath), Faughalstown, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Faughalstown, Co. Westmeath

What makes this particular patch of Westmeath pasture quietly unsettling is that it no longer exists, at least not in any visible form.

At some point between its survey and 2005, a ringfort that had survived the better part of fifteen centuries was levelled entirely, leaving nothing detectable from the air. Aerial photographs taken in both 2005 and November 2011 show no trace of it whatsoever.

Before it vanished, the site was a fairly typical example of an early medieval rath, the earthen-banked enclosures that once numbered in the tens of thousands across Ireland and served as farmsteads for a farming family and their livestock. This one sat in hilly pasture-land in Faughalstown townland, about 800 metres northeast of Lough Derravaragh, the long glacial lake associated in mythology with the Children of Lir. The enclosure was sub-circular, roughly 21 metres north to south and 22 metres east to west, ringed by an earthen bank and an external fosse, the term for the accompanying defensive ditch. An entrance gap just over two and a half metres wide opened to the east, approached by a low causeway spanning the fosse. Inside, the ground sloped gently from east-northeast to west-southwest, and near the centre sat a low, irregular mound, only about fifteen centimetres high, which may have been the last trace of a hut site. Notably, the bank itself appeared to have been steepened at some point in relatively modern times, suggesting the earthwork had been interfered with or modified well before its final obliteration. The site lay only fifteen metres east of the townland boundary with Ringstown, close enough that fieldwork and boundary adjustments over generations may have contributed to its gradual erosion.

There is, in practical terms, nothing to visit. The site is recorded, named, and measured, but the ground itself gives nothing away.

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Pete F
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