Ringfort (Rath), Monroe, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Monroe, Co. Westmeath

What was once a double-banked enclosure protecting an early medieval farmstead has been quietly dismantled by centuries of agricultural use, leaving only half a ringfort on a gentle slope in County Westmeath.

A ringfort, or rath, is the most common monument type in the Irish landscape, typically a circular area enclosed by one or more earthen banks with an intervening ditch, known as a fosse, and used as a defended homestead from roughly the third to the twelfth centuries. This particular example, however, is notable less for what survives than for the ingenuity with which the landscape absorbed it.

The monument sits on a north-west facing slope of a low rise, surrounded by gently undulating grassland, and was formally placed on the Register of Historic Monuments in February 1977. It originally measured approximately forty metres across, enclosed by two earthen banks with a fosse between them, a configuration that would once have made it a fairly substantial enclosure. The eastern half has been levelled entirely. The inner bank is poorly preserved throughout, the fosse has silted up at the north-east, and the outer bank survives in places as little more than a counterscarp, the slight outward slope at the edge of a ditch. More curiously, the fosse itself appears to have been deliberately re-cut at some point and converted into a sunken laneway, now only visible from the south-west. A field boundary bisects the interior on a north-west to south-east line, and post-1837 field fences cut across the perimeter at the north-east, meaning the landscape of nineteenth-century land reorganisation has left its own mark on top of an early medieval one. The site also sits within a notably dense cluster of monuments: two further ringforts lie within 320 metres, and a ring-barrow and a stepped-barrow, both prehistoric burial mound types, sit just 100 metres to the south-west.

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