Ringfort (Rath), Ballinealoe, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Ballinealoe, Co. Westmeath

On a slight rise in the gently rolling grassland of County Westmeath, there is almost nothing left to see.

That near-absence is precisely what makes this site worth knowing about. What was once a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, a roughly circular earthen enclosure typically built during the early medieval period and used as a farmstead or place of habitation, has been reduced to a ghostly outline barely registering above the surrounding ground.

When the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map was produced in 1837, the enclosure was recorded clearly enough to be depicted as a sub-circular shape, roughly thirty metres across from east to west. By the time fieldwork was carried out on the site, almost all of that had gone. What survives is a fragmentary earthen bank, wide but vanishingly low, measuring around 3.4 metres across and a mere five centimetres in height at most. It sits on a slight elevation, with the boundaries of the neighbouring townlands of Simonstown and Lispopple close by to the north-east and east. A second ringfort lies around 190 metres to the north-north-west, a reminder that these features were once distributed thickly across the Irish countryside, often in clusters, before centuries of agriculture quietly erased them.

There is very little for the eye to catch here now. The value is almost entirely conceptual: standing on that low rise, knowing that the faint swell in the ground beneath your feet was once a dwelling, and that the 1837 map recorded what the land itself can no longer tell you.

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Pete F
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