Ringfort (Rath), Piercetown, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Ringforts
On a high, prominent hill in the grassland of County Westmeath, there is a ringfort that has been reduced, over the centuries, to little more than a gentle rise in the ground.
Ringforts, the enclosed circular settlements that were once a defining feature of the early medieval Irish landscape, survive in various states across the country, but this one in Piercetown has fared worse than most. What the eye catches now is a sub-circular swell of earth, roughly 22 metres north to south and 20 metres east to west, edged by a low scarp and the faint ghost of an external fosse, the shallow ditch that would once have reinforced the enclosure's boundary. The hill position is striking in its own right, offering clear sightlines in every direction, which may well explain why the site was chosen in the first place.
By 1837, when the Ordnance Survey produced its Fair Plan map of the area, the fort was still legible enough to be drawn as a small, roughly circular enclosure with trees along its perimeter, annotated plainly as a 'fort'. That cartographic record is now more informative than the ground itself. In the years since, the site has been partially levelled and considerably degraded, leaving only those faint surface traces to mark what was once a defined and probably inhabited enclosure. There is a second ringfort roughly 200 metres to the south-east, suggesting this part of Westmeath was once more densely settled than the quiet grassland now implies. The site was placed on the Register of Historic Monuments, as recorded in Iris Oifigiúil, on 11 February 1975, giving it formal legal protection, though that designation arrived too late to reverse what had already been lost.
