Ringfort (Rath), Kerinstown And Balrowan, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Ringforts
On a gentle rise in the undulating pasture of County Westmeath, straddling the townland boundary of Kerinstown and Balrowan, sits a ringfort whose inner bank is nearly twice as tall on its outer face as on its inner one.
That asymmetry is not accidental. A ringfort, or rath, is a roughly circular enclosure built during the early medieval period in Ireland, typically between the fifth and twelfth centuries, and used as a defended farmstead. The deliberate steepening of the exterior bank was an engineering choice, making the perimeter harder to scale from outside while keeping the interior open and usable.
When the monument was formally described in 1970, surveyors measured a circular area of approximately 36 metres in diameter, enclosed by an earth and stone inner bank, a fosse (a defensive ditch), and the remains of a further outer bank. That outer bank, between 2.5 and 4.2 metres wide, survives along the western, northern, and eastern arcs. To the south and south-east, a natural scarp in the ground takes the place of a constructed fosse, lending the southern perimeter an air of being deliberately dug when it is, in fact, a quirk of local topography. The original entrance is still identifiable at the northern side: two corresponding gaps in the banks flank a slight causeway roughly three metres wide at the top and five and a half metres across at its base, raised just 0.3 metres above the surrounding ground. The interior itself is not flat but rises gently, mound-like, from the perimeter toward the centre. A large C-shaped quarry hole cuts into the north-western quadrant, and a separate quarry depression sits in the scarp to the south-west, signs that the site has been worked for stone at some point in its post-medieval life, removing material that might otherwise have told a fuller story of what once stood inside.