Ringfort (Rath), Scurlockstown, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Ringforts
On a gentle hillock in County Westmeath, the east-facing slope holds a ringfort that has been quietly collapsing into the landscape for centuries.
What survives is a raised, roughly oval platform, measuring approximately 31 metres north to south and 35 metres east to west, enclosed by an earthen bank and an outer fosse, the shallow ditch that typically ran around such enclosures to reinforce the barrier and signal the boundary of a defended farmstead. The bank has been substantially dug away on its eastern side, and the fosse is only legible now along the northern arc. Another ringfort sits just 280 metres to the north-east, suggesting this stretch of Westmeath was once a settled, farmed landscape rather than the quiet grassland it appears today.
Ringforts, known in Irish as raths when built from earth rather than stone, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically dating from roughly the sixth to the twelfth centuries. They housed farming families and their livestock, and the earthworks served as much to define social territory as to provide physical defence. At Scurlockstown, the interior of the enclosure slopes from east to west and still carries faint traces of cultivation ridges running roughly north to south across the ground, the corrugated remains of ridge-and-furrow agriculture that post-dates or perhaps overlaps with the ringfort's active use. In the western quadrant, the outline of a rectangular house is still visible, and immediately to its east a slight depression may indicate a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage that early medieval households used for storage and, in times of threat, as a place of concealment. A bog lies roughly 500 metres to the north, which would have been a useful resource for fuel and possibly for preserving food, and the proximity of two ringforts in such a small area hints at a community of some density here at one point.