It is the kind of thing you could walk past without quite registering what you were looking at, which is perhaps the most remarkable thing about it: this is an early medieval homestead, roughly fifteen centuries old, that has survived largely intact beneath the skin of the modern pastoral landscape.

The structure is a rath, the most common type of ringfort found across Ireland. A rath is essentially a circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks, thrown up in the early medieval period, roughly between 500 and 1000 AD, to enclose a farmstead and offer a degree of protection to the family and livestock within. This example measures approximately 30 metres north to south and 29 metres east to west, making it a fairly typical specimen in terms of scale. Its enclosing bank still stands to a height of 2.25 metres, which is a meaningful survival. On the south-south-west to north-west arc, a shallow external fosse, the term for the accompanying ditch from which the bank material was originally dug, remains visible in the ground. The combination of a well-preserved bank and a legible fosse gives a clearer picture than many comparable sites, where centuries of agriculture have reduced the earthworks to little more than a slight rise in a field.