Ringfort (Rath), Balleagny, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Ringforts
On a prominent hilltop in County Westmeath, surrounded by gently rolling pasture, there is almost nothing left to see, and that near-absence is itself the point.
What once stood here was a ringfort, or rath, one of the thousands of roughly circular earthwork enclosures built across Ireland during the early medieval period, typically as enclosed farmsteads defended by a raised bank and an outer ditch known as a fosse. By the time anyone formally described this one in 1975, it had been reduced to faint traces of a levelled bank enclosing a subcircular area of approximately twenty-nine metres in diameter. The fosse had vanished entirely. The original entrance could no longer be identified. The interior, sloping gently to the north-west, was disturbed by modern cultivation ridges.
The site does, however, leave a paper trail that stretches back nearly two centuries. The Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1837 marks it as a roughly circular enclosure annotated simply as "Fort", the standard notation surveyors used for such earthworks at the time. By the revised twenty-five-inch edition of 1913 the shape had shifted to a modified oval, suggesting that agricultural activity was already altering what remained. Earlier still, the earthwork appears on an estate map of Sonna Demesne, held at the National Library of Ireland, which records it as a circular earthwork within the managed landscape of the demesne. Each successive representation shows a monument quietly losing ground to the land around it.
Today the site is most visible not to the naked eye but on aerial photography, where the faint outline of the enclosure can still be traced against the surrounding pasture. The hilltop position, with its commanding views in all directions, makes clear why someone chose this particular spot, even if the structure they built there has all but disappeared into the grass.