Ringfort (Rath), Loughanstown, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Ringforts
On a gentle but conspicuous rise in the hilly grassland of County Westmeath, a circular earthwork sits quietly among the fields, its double-bank construction marking it out from the typical single-ringed examples that dot the Irish countryside.
This is a rath, the common Irish term for a ringfort, an enclosed farmstead of the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries, where a farming family would have lived within a protected circuit of banks and ditches. What makes this particular example worth a second look is the survival of its concentric layout: two earthen banks separated by a fosse, that is, a ditch, encircling an interior roughly twenty metres across. Double-banked ringforts are less common than single-ringed ones, and were generally associated with higher-status occupants.
The inner bank is the more substantial of the two and is best preserved along the arc running from the east-northeast around through south to the west-northwest. The fosse between the banks is described as wide and deep, though it has been levelled in places, particularly at the west-northwest and southwest. The outer bank, a low combination of earth and stone, is poorly preserved overall. At the northeast, a gap of about two and a half metres marks the original entrance, approached by a causeway that still stands roughly sixty centimetres above the base of the fosse. A field fence, running northwest to southeast, cuts across the fosse and outer bank on the western side, a reminder of the centuries of agricultural use that have worn at the monument since it was last occupied. A second ringfort lies approximately two hundred metres to the northwest, suggesting this was once a more densely settled stretch of landscape than its present pastoral quiet implies. Aerial photographs taken in 1968 captured the outline of the monument clearly from above, preserving a record of its form at a time before some of the later ground-level degradation had progressed further.