Ringfort (Cashel), Ballintue, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Ringforts
A small stone enclosure sitting in ordinary Westmeath farmland might not announce itself as anything remarkable, yet the cashel at Ballintue carries a particular quiet strangeness: it is a ringfort built not from earthen banks and ditches, as most Irish examples are, but from dry stone, and it has sat largely unnoticed on a slight rise in gently undulating grassland for an unknown number of centuries.
A cashel is simply the stone-walled equivalent of an earthen ringfort, the kind of enclosed farmstead that was the standard unit of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically housing a single family and their livestock. Most Westmeath examples are earthworks; a dry-stone construction in this landscape is the exception rather than the rule.
The site was recorded as early as 1837, when the Ordnance Survey Fair Plan map depicted it as a small circular earthwork and annotated it plainly as a "fort". What survives today is a roughly circular area measuring about 11.2 metres north to south and 12.5 metres east to west, enclosed by a dry-stone wall approximately one metre wide and 0.8 metres high. Inside the enclosure, a further collapsed wall survives in an L-shape, its longer arm running roughly west-south-west to east-north-east over about five metres, its shorter arm extending around 3.2 metres. This interior wall is noticeably broader than the enclosing one, at 1.8 metres wide, and its date and original function remain uncertain. It may be a later addition, a structural remnant from a different phase of activity, or something else entirely; the record does not resolve the question.
