Ringfort (Rath), Lakill And Moortown, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Lakill And Moortown, Co. Westmeath

Between Lakill and Moortown in County Westmeath, a ringfort has effectively ceased to exist above ground, yet it refuses to disappear entirely.

The earthwork, which survives only as a crop mark visible in aerial photographs taken in 2005 and again in 2011, is one of those places that reveals itself more clearly from the air than it ever could to someone walking the field. The soil remembers what the plough has tried to erase.

A ringfort, or rath, was typically a circular or sub-circular enclosure defined by an earthen bank and an outer ditch, known as a fosse, used as a farmstead or defended homestead during the early medieval period in Ireland. By the time surveyors documented this particular example in 1976, it was still legible on the ground: a roughly circular area approximately 22 metres north to south and 20 metres east to west, bounded by a well-preserved earthen bank with traces of a fosse running from the west-northwest around to the northeast. There was a wide entrance gap on the eastern side, possibly widened at some point in more recent times, and the interior sloped gently from northwest to southeast, with faint traces of cultivation ridges suggesting the enclosed space had been turned over to farming at some stage. Since then, the monument has been levelled entirely. The field boundaries to its immediate west, still visible on older Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, have likewise been removed. The site sits on a low rise in undulating pasture, with Lough Lene lying roughly 700 metres to the southeast, and it is part of a broader archaeological landscape; a barrow-cemetery of seven burial mounds lies approximately 370 metres to the east, a reminder that this gentle, unremarkable-looking ground was once considered significant enough to mark repeatedly across different periods of prehistory and early history.

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