Ringfort (Rath), Kilpatrick, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Ringforts
On the north-western slope of a high ridge in County Westmeath, a ringfort survives in a state that tells you almost as much about modern land use as it does about early medieval Ireland.
What remains is roughly D-shaped rather than the full circle you might expect, because a townland boundary has cut through it from the south-west, round through west, and up to the north, leaving the enclosing bank incomplete on its north-western side. Ringforts, or raths, were enclosed farmsteads typically built between roughly 500 and 1000 AD, their earthen banks defining a protected space for a family, their livestock, and their outbuildings. This one has been further divided by a field fence across its south-western quadrant, which has absorbed part of the original perimeter into itself, the old bank quietly pressed into service as a modern boundary.
When surveyors examined the site in the late 1970s, they found a partially levelled semicircular enclosure measuring approximately 40 metres on its north-east to south-west axis and 34 metres across. The surviving bank, visible from the north and east but levelled away along the southern and eastern sides, still had some presence: nearly a metre high on its exterior face, with a basal width of 4.6 metres tapering to less than a metre at the top. These are substantial proportions for an earthen bank, suggesting the original enclosure would have been a fairly significant one. The 1837 Ordnance Survey six-inch map already recorded the earthwork as semicircular, which means the truncation was well established before anyone thought to document it carefully. Inside the surviving portion, faint traces of cultivation ridges run across the north-eastern half, evidence that the enclosed ground was ploughed at some point after the rath fell out of use. Aerial photography has confirmed what ground-level inspection suggests: a roughly D-shaped cropmark, visible as a band of differential growth, marks where the buried bank and ditch still influence the soil and the grass above it.