Ringfort, Clonkeen, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Ringforts
On the southern bank of the River Inny, where Westmeath meets Longford and the Creggy River slides into the larger waterway just sixty metres to the east, there is a ringfort that no longer looks like one.
A ringfort is a roughly circular enclosure, typically defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, and used in early medieval Ireland as a farmstead or place of habitation. This particular example survives not as a visible earthwork but essentially as a cartographic memory, its physical form erased by drainage machinery and buried, at least in part, beneath spoil heaps left over from river works.
The 1837 Ordnance Survey Fair Plan map records it clearly enough: a circular enclosure approximately twenty-five metres across from east to west, delineated by two concentric lines and annotated simply as "fort". The double boundary suggests it once had an inner and outer bank, a more substantial arrangement than many simpler single-ringed examples. What the nineteenth-century surveyors recorded has since been lost to the kind of large-scale drainage intervention that altered rivers and their margins across the Irish midlands throughout the twentieth century. The Inny here marks the county boundary, and the fort sat right on that edge, close to Templeavally church and its associated graveyard, which lie roughly 275 metres to the south, hinting at a landscape that was once meaningfully organised around this general area across different periods.