Ringfort (Rath), Macetown, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Ringforts
Most of what survives at Macetown in County Westmeath is invisible to the casual eye.
The rath here, a type of enclosed farmstead that once defined the Irish rural landscape during the early medieval period, has been almost entirely ploughed away. What remains is less a monument than a memory pressed into the soil, legible only to those who know what to look for.
By 1970, when the site was formally described, it had been reduced to a roughly circular area measuring approximately 39.3 metres north to south and 37 metres east to west. The defining features of a rath, typically an earthen bank and an encircling ditch, survive here only in remnant form. The scarp, the inner raised edge of the original bank, reaches a maximum height of just 0.6 metres, and the outer fosse, a ditch roughly 4.8 metres wide, no longer holds its shape as a physical depression. Instead it shows up as a cropmark, a band of differential plant growth caused by the buried ditch retaining more moisture than the surrounding soil, revealing the old outline from above but leaving little trace at ground level. The entrance, once the defining feature of any such enclosure, is no longer recognisable. The site sat on the western-northwest side of a low ridge with open views in several directions, a position typical of early farmers who favoured elevated ground with good sightlines. It was already being recorded as a \'Fort\' on the 1837 Ordnance Survey Fair Plan map, and appeared again on the revised 1913 edition of the OS 25-inch map as a roughly circular earthwork. The rath is still detectable on aerial photography as a suboval cropmark, the ghost of an enclosure that once sheltered a household now entirely unknown to us.