Ringfort (Rath), Kilpatrick, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Kilpatrick, Co. Westmeath

On the north-western slope of a low ridge in County Westmeath, a shallow oval in the pasture marks the remains of an early medieval ringfort, the kind of enclosed farmstead that once defined the rural landscape of Ireland.

From the ground, it is easy to walk past without registering what you are looking at. The bank that once enclosed the settlement has been worn down to little more than a steep scarp in places, and the fosse, the defensive ditch that ran around the outside, survives only as a very narrow depression along the eastern and south-eastern arc. A gap in the south-south-east, roughly 3.4 metres wide at the top and 2 metres at the base, is likely the original entrance through which livestock and people passed daily, perhaps for centuries.

The site was recorded as an oval-shaped earthwork on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1837, with its long axis running east to west, measuring approximately 35 metres on the north-west to south-east axis and 22 metres across. Inside, the ground slopes gently toward the north-east, and faint traces of cultivation ridges are still discernible running roughly east to west. In the southern part of the interior, a possible house site has been identified, hinting at the domestic life that once unfolded within this modest enclosure. A companion feature to this site, a second ringfort nearby, has been so thoroughly levelled that it survives only as a faint cropmark on aerial photography, the buried ditches and banks showing up in dry summers as differential growth in the vegetation above them. Together they suggest a settled, working landscape in early medieval Kilpatrick, long before the present field boundaries were laid down.

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Pete F
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