This is the kind of site that rewards a second look: not dramatic in scale, but unusually well preserved, and carrying within it a small puzzle that archaeology has not quite resolved.

The rath at Ballywataire measures roughly 31 metres north to south and 28.5 metres east to west, making it a fairly typical example of its type. A rath is an enclosed farmstead of the early medieval period, generally dated to somewhere between the sixth and tenth centuries, consisting of a raised circular bank, usually of earth, with a ditch outside it. Thousands were built across Ireland, and Ballywataire's survives in good condition, its bank and external fosse, the term for the enclosing ditch, still intact. A gap on the south-south-west side may represent the original entrance, though this has not been confirmed through excavation. What makes the site quietly interesting is an observation made by a researcher named Neary in 1914, who recorded the existence of a second, outer bank around the rath. No visible trace of that feature remains above ground today. Whether it was levelled by farming, eroded over the intervening century, or simply misidentified is unknown. Its disappearance is a small but telling reminder of how much the Irish landscape has lost even within living memory of the early twentieth century, and of how much a single fieldwork visit can record before the ground moves on.