Ringfort (Rath), Milltown, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Milltown, Co. Westmeath

On a south-westerly slope in County Westmeath, partially obscured by surrounding hills and a modern field boundary that cuts through its north-east quadrant, there sits a rath whose outline has been quietly fragmenting for at least two centuries.

A rath, or ringfort, is a roughly circular earthen enclosure, typically dating from the early medieval period and used as a farmstead or place of habitation. What makes this one quietly arresting is how the documentary record allows you to watch it disappear over time, one map edition at a time.

The 1837 Ordnance Survey six-inch map shows the monument as a complete circular earthwork, with a small rectangular structure or house site visible at its centre. By the time the revised twenty-five-inch OS map was published in 1913, the enclosure had been reduced to a penannular shape, the field boundary already having bitten into the north-east quadrant. When the monument was formally described in 1970, surveyors recorded a subcircular area measuring roughly 38 metres north-west to south-east and 31 metres north-east to south-west, enclosed by a bank that survives best along the south-east to south-west arc and is worn down to little more than a scarp elsewhere. There is no visible fosse, the term for the external ditch that typically accompanies such enclosures, which may suggest erosion or simply that none was ever dug here. A gap roughly five metres wide at the south-east is thought to mark the original entrance. Inside, the ground slopes gently southward and retains faint traces of cultivation ridges running north-west to south-east, the corrugated remains of former ridge-and-furrow ploughing. A slight depression along the inner edge of the bank has been noted, though its purpose remains uncertain. Aerial photography shows the site today as a tree-planted enclosure, the ring of vegetation now doing much of the work of marking a boundary that the earthwork itself can no longer reliably hold.

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