Ringfort (Rath), Balroe, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Ringforts
A low scarp in a wet Westmeath field is not the most dramatic thing to encounter, but what remains at Balroe carries a particular kind of melancholy.
The earthwork, a rath or ringfort of the kind that once served as a defended farmstead enclosure in early medieval Ireland, has been whittled down to an oval ridge barely a metre high, bisected by a twentieth-century field fence that runs northeast to southwest through what was once a coherent monument. North of that fence, nothing survives at all.
The site's story of gradual erasure can be tracked through maps. The first Ordnance Survey six-inch edition of 1837 records a clearly oval enclosure on this low-lying grassland. By the time the revised twenty-five-inch OS map was published in 1911, the same feature had been reduced to a semi-circular earthwork, meaning that sometime in those intervening seventy-odd years roughly half the monument was levelled, most likely by agricultural improvement. The surviving scarp measures approximately 45 metres across its northeast to southwest axis. A possible moated site, a category of medieval enclosed settlement typically defined by a platform surrounded by a water-filled ditch, lies some 55 metres to the northwest, which raises the quiet question of whether this low, wet corner of Westmeath was once rather more occupied than its present emptiness suggests.
The interior of the surviving portion is level, with a slight slope running in the same northeast to southwest direction as the fence that now cuts across it. The ground underfoot is wet grassland, consistent with the broader landscape. There is nothing here to announce itself, which is rather the point; the monument persists less as a presence than as a remainder, a partial outline of something that maps and fieldwork together have to reconstruct.