Analytical and numerical models are used to study the effects of a meridional ridge on the propagation of barotropic Rossby waves produced by distant wind stress forcing. The analytical model illustrates the qualitative aspects of the problem by solving a simplified form of the potential vorticity equation. The analytical results are complemented by numerical experiments using a shallow-water model. In these experiments, waves are excited near the eastern boundary of the model. The effect that the presence of a meridional ridge has on the propagation of these waves is evaluated using spectral analysis. The numerical experiments show that the ridge acts as a low-pass filter for westward propagating waves. In a 4000-m deep ocean a ridge 500 km wide and 500 m high has little effect in preventing energy transmission by barotropic waves. The topographic effect increases sharply with the ridge's height so that a 2000-m ridge almost isolates two neighboring subbasins. The numerical results indicate that for the range of geophysically relevant cases the ridge's width plays only a minor role. ¿ American Geophysical Union 1995