Ringfort, Stonestown, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Ringforts

Ringfort, Stonestown, Co. Westmeath

A field in Stonestown, County Westmeath holds a monument that was photographed, measured, and puzzled over in 1970, and then erased from the landscape within the same year.

What stands there now is ordinary pasture on a gentle natural rise, with nothing visible at the surface to indicate that anything ever existed beneath the grass.

The site appears on the 1837 Ordnance Survey Fair Plan map as a roughly circular earthwork, labelled simply as "fort", which is the map-maker's shorthand for a ringfort, the type of circular enclosure most commonly associated with early medieval farming settlements in Ireland. When an Office of Public Works field officer visited in May 1970, however, the monument complicated that tidy classification. The written report describes a roughly D-shaped enclosure measuring approximately 30 metres by 35 metres, with no clearly defined bank and no fosse, the encircling ditch that is one of the defining features of a true ringfort. The officer noted what appeared to be the suggestion of a small house inside the enclosure, though the observation was heavily qualified, and proposed that the structure might be an old farmstead rather than a ringfort at all. That ambiguity was never resolved. Land improvement works later in 1970 levelled the monument entirely, and whatever was there, whether a failed ringfort, a collapsed enclosure wall around a farmstead, or something harder to categorise, was removed before it could be properly investigated. The natural rise on which it sat remains, offering the same open views of the surrounding countryside that would once have made it a practical place to build.

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Pete F
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