Ringfort (Rath), Lugnagullagh, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Ringforts
A field boundary runs straight through the middle of this ringfort in Lugnagullagh, Co. Westmeath, bisecting what was once a coherent enclosure into two unequal halves.
That division, running northwest to southeast, had already been established by the time the Ordnance Survey revised its 25-inch map in 1913, and the earthwork has been losing ground to agricultural activity ever since. Half of it survives as a tree-lined bank; the other half has been reduced to a cropmark, visible only from the air as differential growth in the vegetation above it, where the buried remains alter the soil moisture enough to leave a faint impression on aerial photography.
Ringforts, known in Irish as raths when they are earthen rather than stone-built, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically serving as the enclosed farmsteads of farmers and local landholders. This one sits on a low rise in undulating pasture, which would have been a sensible choice for anyone seeking to keep watch over the surrounding land; even now it commands good views in all directions. When surveyors described it in 1980, the monument measured roughly 32.5 metres in diameter and was still enclosed by a bank and an external fosse, that is, a ditch running around the outside of the bank. The bank remained well-preserved along its northern and eastern arcs, but had been largely levelled along the southern and western sides. The fosse told a similar story, intact to the northeast and east, infilled to the south and west. No entrance was identified, though a disturbance gap in the bank at the east-northeast may hint at where one once existed. On the outer edge of the fosse, along the northern and eastern stretch, the remains of an old field bank suggest later agricultural reworking of the monument's edges, with material possibly re-deposited there over time. Old cultivation ridges inside and around the enclosure point to the land having been worked in strips at some point, further obscuring the original layout.