Ringfort (Rath), Ballynacarrow, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Ringforts
At the lip of a disused quarry in County Westmeath, a ringfort is quietly disappearing into the hillside.
The eastern bank of this ancient enclosure has slipped down a steep slope where the quarrying cut into the ground beneath it, leaving a disturbed earthen rim teetering at the edge. It is an odd, slightly vertiginous situation for a monument of this kind: a rath, which is a ringfort defined by a circular earthen bank and sometimes an accompanying ditch or fosse, was typically built to enclose a farmstead and assert a degree of social standing. This one, roughly twenty-five metres in diameter, now sits half-swallowed by scrub and tree cover, its western and northern quadrants particularly dense with overgrowth.
The site occupies the north-eastern shoulder of a hill in pasture land, with views opening out towards Mount Dalton Lough to the east, south, and west, though higher ground to the south-west and north cuts those prospects short. The Ordnance Survey mapped it in 1837 as a clearly circular earthwork; by the revised edition of 1913, surveyors recorded it as slightly modified and roughly oval in shape, a change that hints at gradual erosion or disturbance in the intervening decades. When the site was described in detail in 1983, the enclosing bank was already intermittent, standing to only about a metre in height and best preserved on the western side. No entrance was identifiable, and no fosse, the external ditch that often accompanies such monuments, was visible. The interior surface was uneven, broken up by natural rock outcroppings and general disturbance, and a possible internal structure was noted within the western quadrant. In the field immediately to the east, cultivation ridges running north-west to south-east suggest that the surrounding land has its own long agricultural history, separate from the monument itself.
From aerial photography the ringfort reads as a roughly circular ring of trees, which is often how these earthworks announce themselves from above when the ground-level evidence has become too degraded to read clearly. The quarrying that undermined the eastern bank remains the most arresting detail: an industrial intrusion that has left the monument partly suspended over empty space, the outer edge of its bank slowly subsiding into the cut below.