Ringfort (Rath), Parsonstown, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Parsonstown, Co. Westmeath

On a high ridge in Parsonstown, County Westmeath, what survives of an early medieval ringfort is now barely legible in the landscape.

A cropmark, faintly visible on aerial photography taken in November 2011, is about all that announces the presence of a once-upstanding enclosure. The site belongs to a class of monument known as a rath, a ringfort defined by an earthen bank and surrounding ditch rather than stone walling, and typically associated with the farmsteads of relatively prosperous families during the early medieval period in Ireland, roughly from the fifth to the twelfth centuries.

When the site was described in 1970, it still retained enough above-ground form to be measured and assessed. The enclosure was sub-circular, running approximately 34 metres on a northwest to southeast axis and about 30 metres northeast to southwest, enclosed by an earthen bank with a slight external fosse, the shallow ditch that would have reinforced both the defensive and the symbolic boundary of the settlement. Even then, the bank had been substantially levelled along its southern and southwestern arc, and only the northwestern stretch of the fosse retained any real depth. Inside the enclosure, the ground slopes gently from north-northwest down to south-southeast, and faint traces of cultivation ridges running northeast to southwest across the interior suggest that the site was at some point turned over to tillage, a process that would have continued the gradual erosion of whatever earthworks remained. The townland boundary with Kilmaglish runs along a stream and field fence just 70 metres to the southwest, and the ridge position gives open views across a wide sweep of the surrounding countryside to the southeast, southwest, and northwest, the kind of elevated, well-watched ground that would have made the original siting of the enclosure a deliberate choice.

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