House - indeterminate date, Balgarrett, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
House
Inside an ancient ringfort on a natural hillock in Balgarrett, County Westmeath, the earthwork outlines of at least two rectangular stone houses sit at right angles to one another, their walls reduced now to low banks of earth and stone.
That perpendicular arrangement is what first catches the attention. Most ruined structures within ringforts, the circular enclosed settlements common across early medieval Ireland, tend to be isolated or loosely scattered. Here the buildings appear to have been deliberately linked, suggesting a planned domestic complex rather than a single dwelling added to an older enclosure.
The two surviving house sites are closely matched in scale. The larger, southernmost structure measures roughly 12 metres north to south and 8 metres east to west; the second, set perpendicular to it, runs approximately 11 metres east to west and 8 metres north to south. Both show traces of internal divisions, hinting at separate rooms or functional zones within each building. A survey description from 1977 characterised the remains as part of a large, stone-built complex of linked houses running roughly north-west to south-east, and suggested that what survives represents only part of something more extensive. In the fields immediately to the south and west, cultivation ridges running roughly east to south are still legible, the corrugated traces of former strip farming that speak to a long period of agricultural use around the site. The date of the houses has not been firmly established, and the ringfort that contains them adds another layer of ambiguity, since such enclosures were built and used across a broad span of centuries in Ireland.
The remains are visible on aerial photography, and the cultivation ridges in the surrounding fields are the kind of detail that rewards a slow look at the landscape rather than a quick pass. The hillock setting, rising gently from good pasture, means the site sits slightly apart from the flat ground around it, which may be precisely why it was chosen in the first place.