Ringfort (Rath), Pishanagh, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Ringforts
On a gentle swell of pasture in County Westmeath, a ring of trees marks the outline of a ringfort, the kind of early medieval enclosed settlement that once dotted the Irish countryside in their tens of thousands.
This one sits on a low natural rise with open views in every direction, a quality that would have mattered to whoever chose the spot, whether for watching livestock, watching neighbours, or simply watching. From the air it reads clearly as a roughly circular enclosure, the tree line doing the work that earthworks alone no longer can.
The site appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1837, shown as an oval-shaped ringfort in a narrow field, roughly ten metres northwest of a public road. By the revised twenty-five-inch edition of 1913, it is recorded with a surrounding fosse, the shallow external ditch that typically accompanied these enclosures, with field boundaries radiating outward from the monument to the east, southeast, and west, a pattern that suggests the rath had long been accommodated into the working landscape around it. When the site was described in 1980, the enclosure measured approximately 39 metres northeast to southwest and 35 metres northwest to southeast. The inner bank, reduced to a low scarp, still retained traces of internal and external stone facing, most visible along the northwestern arc. Four gaps pierce the bank at various points, and the one at the north-northeast now serves as the entrance, though this may not be where the original entrance stood. The outer bank, also low and disturbed, had been entirely removed along the northern and eastern stretch by the time of that description. Inside, the ground slopes gently toward the east-northeast, and loose scatters of field-clearance stones lie off-centre toward the southeast, their arrangement forming no recognisable pattern. More recent disturbance has added to the picture: field boundaries that appeared on the 1913 map were removed at some point after that survey, and the material was deposited directly into the fosse on the eastern and southeastern sides.