Ringfort (Rath), Rathlevanagh, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Ringforts
What makes this site quietly compelling is not grandeur but persistence.
On a slight rise on the north-western face of a hill near Rathlevanagh in County Westmeath, a ringfort has been worn down to little more than a ghost of itself, yet it refuses to disappear entirely. Ringforts, sometimes called raths, were the enclosed farmsteads of early medieval Ireland, typically consisting of a circular bank and ditch surrounding a living area. Here, that enclosure survives as a gently raised circular platform, roughly 34 metres across at its widest, with only the south-eastern arc still showing a readable fosse and outer bank. The rest has been softened by centuries of farming and weather into something you might almost mistake for a natural swell in the ground.
The site sits in open grassland, close to the townland boundary with Loughanstown, which runs about 40 metres to the east. Two other ringforts lie within 140 metres in either direction, one to the north-west and one to the south-east, suggesting this part of Westmeath was once a settled and reasonably populated landscape, its farms distributed across the gentle undulations of the countryside at comfortable intervals. At the north-east of the surviving scarp, a depression about 3.2 metres wide may mark the original entrance to the enclosure. Inside, faint traces of cultivation ridges run from east-north-east to west-south-west, evidence that the interior was worked as agricultural ground at some point after the ringfort fell out of use, further blurring the original layout. The outline of the monument, though indistinct at ground level, is clearly legible on aerial photography taken in November 2011, the raised platform and its encircling shallow ditch resolving into a clean circle when seen from above.