Ringfort (Rath), Johnstown, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Johnstown, Co. Westmeath

A low earthen bank curves around a roughly circular enclosure on the western edge of a ridge in County Westmeath, and what makes it quietly compelling is not so much what it is as where it sits.

The ground beneath and around it was once waterlogged wetland, part of the north-western shoreline of Lough Adeel. Whoever built this ringfort, the term for the circular enclosed farmsteads that dot the Irish countryside in their thousands and date broadly to the early medieval period, chose a position at the edge of habitable land, with a stream running just 70 metres to the east and the lake itself less than 300 metres to the south-east. It is the kind of marginal, carefully chosen location that suggests a community making deliberate use of a boundary between dry ground and water.

The remains are modest but legible. The main enclosure measures roughly 26 metres in diameter, defined by an earthen bank, with what appears to be a rectangular annexe or small field attached to the east, itself bounded by a bank and an external fosse, the term for a ditch dug to reinforce an earthwork boundary. There are faint traces of a possible second enclosure immediately to the north, though these are difficult to read and may relate not to the original settlement at all but to post-1700 land improvement works. That ambiguity is part of what makes the site interesting. Some 60 metres to the north-west, a wide L-shaped fosse forms what looks like a rectangular paddock or field, and this too is tied to later land reclamation efforts; the 1910 edition of the Ordnance Survey 25-inch map records several linear drainage ditches across this area, the remnants of a concerted effort to dry out and cultivate what had been boggy ground around the lough's edge. The ringfort, then, sits in a landscape that has been repeatedly rewritten, early medieval enclosure overlaid by post-medieval drainage, both now sinking back into the ridge.

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