Souterrain, Ballysallagh, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Settlement Sites
On a small but prominent hillock in County Westmeath, somewhere beneath a field that has been gently farmed into near-anonymity, there may be a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber of the kind that early medieval communities built beneath ringforts for storage, refuge, or concealment.
The ringfort itself has been levelled, but the land still carries a memory of what stood here: a stone reportedly covered a cavity in the northern quarter of the site, and local knowledge, passed on in conversation as recently as 1972, held that the ground had once belonged to monks.
The 1837 Ordnance Survey records are unusually helpful in reconstructing what has since disappeared. Both the Fair Plan map and the six-inch map of that year show a circular enclosure on this spot, with the Fair Plan annotating it plainly as "Track of fort", meaning the outline of a former ringfort was still legible in the landscape at that point. The field itself was recorded under the name Shankill on the one-inch map of the same edition, a placename derived from the Irish "seanchill", meaning old church, which lends a quiet weight to the local tradition connecting the land to monastic ownership. Whether that tradition reflects an actual early Christian community nearby, or is simply one of those folk memories that accumulates around any place that feels old and set apart, is not possible to say with certainty. What does seem clear is that the hillock attracted human attention across a long stretch of time, and that the cavity beneath the surface, if it is indeed a souterrain, has never been properly investigated.
