Ringfort (Rath), Grange More, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Grange More, Co. Westmeath

There is no obvious entrance.

That small detail, recorded in 1980, is one of the quietly unsettling things about the ringfort at Grange More in County Westmeath. Most raths, the common term for these circular earthwork enclosures built during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries, have a clear break in their bank where a gap or causeway once allowed people and livestock in and out. Here, none has been identified, which leaves the question of how the place was used, and by whom, sitting unanswered on a gentle Westmeath hillside.

The monument sits on a low rise with a slight westward slope, set within open pasture that rolls softly in all directions. When it was formally described in 1980, the earthwork measured roughly 29 metres north to south and 26 metres east to west, making it a modest but reasonably complete example of its type. A rath of this kind would originally have consisted of a raised bank of earth surrounding a homestead or farmstead, with a fosse, that is, a ditch dug on the outside of the bank to provide material for building it up and to add a further barrier. At Grange More, the bank survives best along its southern and south-western arc, where the outer face remains largely intact, though it has been worn to little more than a scarp along other stretches. The fosse is clearest to the north-west and south, but a modern field fence running along the northern perimeter has obscured or replaced whatever earthwork once existed there. Inside the enclosure, the ground slopes gently toward the north-west, and a small, shallow depression sits just within the western edge, its origin uncertain. The whole structure is now ringed by trees, which make it legible on aerial photography even as the earthwork itself continues to erode into the surrounding fields.

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