The one at Ballinphuill in County Mayo fits that general description only loosely, and what survives is stranger and more layered than the category suggests. It sits on a spur of raised ground projecting southward from an east-west ridge, and instead of a simple bank it presents a series of concentric scarped terraces dropping away from a central platform, the whole thing apparently cut and shaped directly from the natural ridge rather than built up from material dug out of a ditch.

The 1838 Ordnance Survey six-inch map shows the enclosure as a complete circle roughly 35 metres across. By 1916, it was already half gone. A railway line had been driven through the southern portion, removing what may have been a third of the original structure, and a ballast pit dug to supply the railway had eaten further into the western side. When the antiquarian Knox visited in the early 1900s and published his observations in 1911, he recorded a raised area south of the cutting that he believed was a surviving fragment; no trace of that survives today. Knox called it the terraced rath and proposed that it might have functioned as something close to a high mote, meaning a raised defensive and residential earthwork of the kind associated with early lordship and settlement. What remains is a central oblong platform, roughly 13 metres east to west, defined by a scarp up to 1.8 metres high on the eastern side, which drops to an inner terrace, then to a second outer terrace, with the remnant of a low stony bank still visible under sod on the north-western edge. Parts of the lower terrace scarp have been absorbed into a stone-faced field boundary.

The narrowness of the central platform is the detail that sits most awkwardly with any straightforward interpretation. It is oddly compressed for a domestic enclosure, and the concentric terracing is more elaborate than a standard rath would require. Whether the form was always like this, or whether the missing southern third once opened things out into something more legible, is now impossible to say.