Ringfort (Rath), Parsonstown, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Parsonstown, Co. Westmeath

On a south-east-facing slope in Parsonstown, County Westmeath, the land gives away an old secret only reluctantly.

What was once a substantial enclosed settlement is now so thoroughly absorbed into the working landscape that it registers primarily as a faint cropmark, visible on an aerial photograph taken in November 2011. The difference in how crops grow above compacted or disturbed soil is often the only legible trace left by ancient habitation, and here that ghostly outline is about all that survives above ground.

The site is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, a form of enclosed farmstead built throughout Ireland roughly between the early medieval period and the Norman arrival. This particular example is oval in plan, measuring approximately 49 metres from west-north-west to east-south-east and 43 metres from north-north-east to south-south-west. Its perimeter is defined by a scarp, a low earthen edge dropping about 0.7 metres, with traces of an external fosse, or ditch, still legible along the northern to south-south-eastern arc. The interior slopes noticeably downward to the south-east, following the natural lie of the ridge on which it sits. A second ringfort lies just 60 metres to the north-west, suggesting that this stretch of elevated ground was considered particularly worthwhile ground for settlement. The position would have offered good views across the south-eastern lowlands, useful both for farming and for keeping watch.

What is quietly striking about this site today is how completely the modern agricultural landscape has grown around and over it. A field fence and trench cut across outside the scarp on the northern and western sides, and a curving field boundary running from south-west through west to north traces the old enclosing bank almost exactly, as though farmers across the generations simply found it practical to follow the same line. The ancient and the contemporary have become difficult to separate without knowing what to look for.

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