Raheen, Ballynacroghy, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Ringforts
On an Ordnance Survey map drawn in 1837, a small mound in County Westmeath was labelled with a phrase that stops you short: "Ratheen or Site of Gallows.
" The annotation offers two possible identities for the same rise in the ground, one ancient and one grimly judicial, without committing to either. That ambiguity has never quite been resolved, and today even the mound itself has gone, levelled at some point before an aerial photograph taken in November 2011 showed nothing remaining at the surface.
What survives is modest. Grass-covered wall footings, roughly 1.7 metres wide and only 0.4 metres high, trace the outline of a small rectangular structure, approximately 4.9 metres by 5.2 metres, which may once have stood in the western quadrant of a ringfort. A ringfort is a circular enclosure, typically defined by an earthen bank and ditch, used in early medieval Ireland as a farmstead or defended residence. The fort itself, if it ever existed here in any substantial form, has also largely disappeared, though slight kinks in the field boundaries to the west and east suggest that a circular enclosure of roughly 40 metres in diameter once shaped the landscape. Fifty metres to the southwest lies the levelled site of a sweathouse, a small corbelled stone structure used for therapeutic sweating, of a type once common across Ulster and the northern midlands. The 1911 edition of the Ordnance Survey 25-inch map still showed the mound, so the levelling happened sometime in the twentieth century, quietly erasing what two maps across nearly eighty years had taken care to record.
The site sits on a gentle east-south-easterly slope amid undulating grassland in Ballynacroghy townland, with open views to the south-east. There is little to see on the ground now, but the field boundaries are worth examining if you can access the land, since those subtle curves in otherwise straight lines are often the last legible trace of enclosures that have otherwise vanished entirely.