Ringfort (Rath), Wattstown, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Ringforts
A low earthen ring sits on a natural rise in County Westmeath, looking out over Lough Owel to the north-east and south-east, and it is easy to walk past it without quite registering what it is.
The monument is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead built across Ireland roughly between the early medieval period and the Norman arrival, typically consisting of a circular bank and an outer ditch enclosing a domestic space. This one measures approximately 34 metres in diameter on its north-east to south-west axis, with a low earthen bank and an external fosse, that is, a ditch running outside the bank. The bank survives most clearly on the southern, western, and west-north-western sides, and has been worn down to a scarp on the other sections.
What makes this particular example quietly telling is the evidence preserved inside it. The interior slopes noticeably from south-west to north-east, and across that slope there are traces of cultivation ridges running in the same direction, suggesting that at some point after the ringfort fell out of use as an enclosed settlement, the ground within it was brought under tillage. This kind of secondary agricultural use is not unusual in Irish ringforts, but seeing the ridges still legible within the old enclosure gives a sense of how continuously the same ground was worked across very different periods. A field fence lined with mature trees now curves around the outer perimeter from west to north to north-east, following the arc of the monument closely enough that the boundary of the ancient earthwork has, in effect, been absorbed into the working field pattern of the landscape around it.