Ringfort (Rath), Ballynafid, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Ballynafid, Co. Westmeath

In the commercial forestry of Ballynafid, a roughly circular earthwork sits quietly on a slope, its interior now entirely smothered by trees.

What marks it out is not rarity exactly, but context: within a radius of little more than 400 metres, two further ringforts survive, making this a corner of County Westmeath that was once, evidently, quite densely settled.

The site is a rath, the most common type of early medieval enclosure in Ireland, typically built between the sixth and tenth centuries as a farmstead for a single family and their livestock. What survives here is a sub-circular bank of earth and stone, roughly 46 metres across on its east-west axis, with an external fosse, meaning a ditch dug around the outside of the bank to reinforce its defensive or boundary function. The interior is flat, which is characteristic of a well-preserved example, though the tree cover now makes any surface detail difficult to read. A railway line runs about 300 metres to the west, a reminder of how closely layers of Irish history tend to overlap, an Iron Age or early medieval enclosure lying just beyond the corridor of a nineteenth-century infrastructure project.

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