Walsh's Raheen, Branganstown, Co. Meath
Co. Meath |
Ringforts
A raheen, from the Irish ráithín meaning a small rath or ringfort, is often the kind of monument that survives almost by accident, half-forgotten in a field corner, named on old maps but rarely remarked upon.
Walsh's Raheen in Branganstown fits that pattern with some precision. Only the southern half of the original enclosure survives, yet what remains is substantial enough to read clearly in the landscape: a grass-covered arc of earthen bank, a rounded fosse, and an outer bank, all sitting on a slight rise in the gently rolling County Meath countryside.
The site appears under the name Walsh's Raheen on both the 1836 and 1912 editions of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, which tells us at least that the name, and the association with a family called Walsh, was already well established by the time of the first systematic Irish mapping. The defensive architecture, though now reduced, was once considerable. The inner bank reaches an external height of 2.6 metres at its south-western point, with a base width of eleven metres; the fosse separating it from the outer bank is 1.6 metres deep and eight metres wide at the top. These are the proportions of a ringfort, an enclosure type common across early medieval Ireland and typically associated with farmsteads of some local status. The southern arc that survives follows a chord of roughly 54 metres from south-east to west. At the south-eastern end, the banks and fosse gradually merge into the field surface, which suggests the original entrance may have been positioned there, a common arrangement allowing livestock and people to pass through without compromising the enclosure's circuit.
