Ringfort (Rath), Garraree, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Ringforts
There is something quietly unsettling about a site that exists now only as a shadow in a crop.
On the lower southern-facing slope of a high ridge in the hilly grassland of Garraree in County Westmeath, a ringfort once occupied a commanding position with open views stretching to the south-east and south-west. By the time a Digital Globe aerial photograph was taken in November 2011, the earthworks had been levelled entirely, surviving only as a cropmark, the kind of ghost impression left in growing grain or grass when buried features alter the soil's drainage and nutrients in subtly different ways.
When the site was recorded on the ground in 1970, it was still legible as a classic example of a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, which was typically a circular enclosure bounded by one or more earthen banks and ditches, used as a farmstead during the early medieval period. This particular example was roughly 31 metres in diameter and enclosed by two earthen banks with a fosse, that is, a ditch, running between them. The inner bank was low and broad, measuring about 6.8 metres wide and 0.4 metres high; the outer bank, narrower at 1.9 metres and slightly taller at 0.52 metres, arced around the outside of the fosse. An entrance gap opened to the south. Inside the enclosure, cultivation ridges ran in a north-north-west to south-south-east direction across the gently sloping interior, evidence that the site had been put to agricultural use long after its original function was forgotten. A field fence had at some point been built along part of the perimeter, from south to north-west, further integrating the old boundary into the working landscape of the farm. A second ringfort lies approximately 90 metres to the south-west, suggesting this corner of Westmeath was once a place of some local significance.