Ringfort (Rath), Templanstown, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Ringforts
In a field of grassland in Templanstown, County Westmeath, a circular earthwork sits quietly in the landscape, its presence known mainly through maps and satellite imagery rather than any physical drama.
This is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, a type of enclosed settlement built predominantly during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Thousands of them survive across Ireland, ranging from well-preserved banks and ditches to the faintest of crop marks, and this example belongs to the quieter end of that spectrum.
What survives here is a roughly circular area approximately 34 metres in diameter, defined not by an upstanding bank but by a scarp, a low slope or edge in the ground surface that traces the original boundary of the enclosure. Its outline was recorded on the Ordnance Survey Ireland 25-inch map series, a large-scale mapping project that captured considerable landscape detail, and the earthwork remained visible in satellite orthoimagery collected between 2011 and 2013. That the feature can still be read from the air, even faintly, suggests that the underlying ground has not been entirely levelled, despite whatever agricultural activity has taken place over the centuries since the enclosure was last in use.