Ringfort (Rath), Scurlockstown, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Ringforts
In the garden of a modern house in Scurlockstown, County Westmeath, the boundary fence follows a curve that has nothing to do with planning regulations or landscaping preference.
It follows the arc of an earthwork that was already old when the first detailed Ordnance Survey maps were drawn in the 1830s. The feature is a rath, or ringfort, the most common monument type in the Irish countryside; a roughly circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks, typically built during the early medieval period as a farmstead or place of habitation. This one sits quietly beneath a row of trees, its original geometry folded so thoroughly into the modern property boundary that it functions as a garden fence.
The 1837 Ordnance Survey six-inch map shows it clearly: a roughly circular earthwork within a small rectangular field, close to a curving townland boundary to the south and a public road to the east. The accompanying Fair Plan map annotated it simply as a "fort". By the revised edition of 1876, however, something had shifted. The enclosure was depicted with a dotted outline and relabelled "site of fort", suggesting the surveyors considered it already degraded or uncertain in form. By the 1913 twenty-five-inch revision it had disappeared from the map entirely, absorbed, presumably, into the developing landscape around it. When the monument was examined on the ground in 1983, what remained was a semi-circular area of approximately thirty metres in diameter, enclosed on the south-east, south, and south-west by an earthen bank reaching about one metre in external height, incorporated into a field fence. On the northern side only a low, poorly defined ridge indicated where the bank had once continued. There was no detectable outer fosse, the defensive ditch that often rings monuments of this type.
Aerial photography has since confirmed what ground-level inspection suggested: a partially tree-lined earthwork curving along the southern boundary of a modern house plot, the remnant of a circuit that was once complete. It is the kind of monument that rewards looking rather than visiting, its shape most legible from above or from historical maps than from any particular vantage on the ground.