Ringfort (Rath), Higginstown, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Ringforts
What looks from the air like a loose ring of trees turns out, on closer inspection, to be something considerably older: an early medieval earthwork sitting quietly in the low-lying pasture of Higginstown, Co. Westmeath, its banks and fosse still holding their shape after more than a thousand years.
A rath, to use the Irish term, was typically a circular or near-circular enclosure formed by one or more earthen banks with a corresponding ditch, or fosse, dug between them. They served as farmsteads and defended homesteads for farming families across early medieval Ireland, and they survive in their thousands across the country, though most have been damaged or erased entirely by agriculture.
This particular example is more complex than it first appears. When it was surveyed in the early 1970s, the monument measured roughly 44.4 metres on its northeast to southwest axis and 36 metres on the northwest to southeast, making it a fairly substantial enclosure. Rather than a simple circle, the shape was recorded as subrectangular, which sets it slightly apart from the more typical round rath form. It has two banks, an inner and an outer, with a fosse between them, and the original entrance is still legible: a gap at the southeast, where a low causeway crosses the ditch, the causeway itself measuring 7.4 metres at its base and surviving to a height of about 35 centimetres. Gaps in the inner bank at the southwest, north, and northeast are likely later disturbances rather than original openings. The interior slopes gently eastward, and faint traces of cultivation ridges run across it, suggesting the enclosed ground was worked at some point after the rath's defensive function had been forgotten or abandoned. A patch of grass-covered rock survives in the southwest sector. The Ordnance Survey's revised 25-inch map of 1913 already showed the earthwork as a circular feature, confirming it was visible and recognisable well over a century ago, long before aerial photography made such sites easier to detect and map.