Ringfort (Rath), Gartlandstown, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Ringforts
What survives at Gartlandstown is less a monument than a memory of one.
The ringfort that once occupied a low rise in this gently undulating stretch of County Westmeath grassland has been almost completely levelled, its enclosing bank repurposed as a field fence and reduced elsewhere to little more than a scarp, a slight break in slope that most walkers would pass without a second thought. Ringforts, sometimes called raths, were enclosed farmsteads typically dating from the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries, defined by a circular earthen bank and an external fosse, or ditch. This one originally measured approximately 36 metres across its north-south axis, a modest but respectable example of the type, with the bank running from the south-west around through west and north to the north-east, and a shallow fosse beyond it. The interior slopes gently from north-west to south-east, and there is a second earthwork of some kind just 100 metres to the south-west.
The clearest picture of what once stood here comes not from the ground but from the 1837 Ordnance Survey Fair Plan map, which recorded the site as a sub-rectilinear enclosure tucked into the south-east corner of a field, annotated simply as 'fort'. That map also noted a gravel pit in the south-west quadrant of the interior, which may itself explain some of the subsequent deterioration. Even in 1837 the enclosing bank was already partially interrupted, cut through by a field boundary along the north-east to south-west arc. The transformation from earthwork to field infrastructure had already begun. What the nineteenth-century cartographers captured was a site in the early stages of being absorbed back into the agricultural landscape around it, a process that has since run close to completion.