Ringfort (Rath), Loughanstown, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Ringforts
A townland boundary runs through the middle of this ringfort, slicing what was once a roughly circular early medieval enclosure into two administrative halves.
That division, between Windtown North and Loughanstown Lower (also known as Slievelahan), has done the site no favours. The eastern portion has been completely levelled, and only a faint crop-mark, the subtle discolouration of grass or grain above a buried feature, hints at where the enclosure once curved around. What survives above ground sits on the western side of that boundary, a poorly preserved bank arcing from south to north-northeast, with slight traces of an outer ditch still legible in the ground.
Ringforts, known in Irish as raths when they are earthen enclosures, are among the most common field monuments in Ireland, typically dating from the early medieval period and serving as the enclosed farmsteads of farming families of modest to middling status. This example was originally circular, with a diameter of approximately thirty metres on a north-northeast to south-southwest axis. At some point in the past the site appears on the Fair Plan, a historical cartographic source, annotated as a D-shaped enclosure, suggesting that the eastern half had already been lost or degraded by the time of that survey. The surrounding landscape is open grassland, with areas of bog lying to the northwest, southwest, and northeast, a setting that would have been characteristic of the wetter, marginal land often found at the edges of early medieval settlement. A second ringfort sits approximately 140 metres to the southeast, which is not unusual; paired or clustered ringforts occur across the Irish midlands, sometimes reflecting family or kinship groupings sharing a landscape over generations.