Ringfort (Rath), Lisnabin, Co. Westmeath

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Lisnabin, Co. Westmeath

A ringfort sitting in woodland in County Westmeath has accumulated two informal names that between them describe its shape rather well.

Local usage recorded by Adams in 1960 knew it as both 'Packenham's Fort' and 'Cup and Saucer', the latter nickname almost certainly a reference to the relationship between the enclosing bank and the wide, shallow outer fosse, or ditch, that surrounds it. That double naming is quietly telling: the site was known well enough to have attracted more than one way of speaking about it, yet it remains the kind of place that rarely appears in any account of the area.

Ringforts, sometimes called raths, are roughly circular or oval enclosures defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, and they are among the most common surviving monuments in Ireland, generally associated with early medieval settlement and farming. This particular example, oval in plan and measuring around 31 metres west-south-west to east-north-east and 25 metres north-north-west to south-south-east according to the revised 1913 Ordnance Survey 25-inch map, sits in woodland just north of the townland boundary, with Lisnabin Castle lying roughly 300 metres to the west. By 1970, the bank was described as poorly preserved, with the north-north-eastern section quarried away and evidence that both the inner and outer faces had been artificially steepened at some point in relatively modern times. The original entrance can no longer be identified, and there is a gap on the south-western side whose origins are unclear. The monument survives today as a tree-planted earthwork, visible on aerial photography as a suboval form beneath the canopy.

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