At first glance, this site in Farrihy, County Limerick, looks like a slightly irregular patch of raised pasture on a south-facing ridge, cluttered with stone and overgrown in places. Look more carefully, and the circular outline of an early medieval farmstead begins to resolve itself from the landscape.

The site is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, which was the standard form of rural settlement in Ireland from roughly the early centuries AD through to the Norman period. A rath typically consisted of a circular area enclosed by one or more earthen banks and ditches, within which a farming family would have lived and kept livestock. This example, recorded by Denis Power and uploaded to the national record in August 2011, sits on the upper slopes of an east-west ridge and measures approximately 18.5 metres north to south and 19.2 metres east to west, making it a fairly modest example of the type. It is defined by a scarped edge, meaning the ground has been cut or shaped to create a low, near-vertical drop, here standing around 0.55 metres high and roughly 0.9 metres wide. Beyond that runs an external fosse, a shallow surrounding ditch now only about 0.1 metres deep and 1.8 metres wide. Both features have suffered considerably from cattle erosion over many years, and much of the interior, along with the enclosing element from the western side around to the north-east, has been further obscured by dumped material from the clearance of nearby field boundaries.

Accessing the site means crossing working farmland, so permission from the landowner would be the right first step. The south-facing slope gives the ridge good light for most of the day, which helps when trying to read the earthwork's shape from ground level. Winter or early spring, before the grass grows thick, tends to be the most useful time for making sense of low earthworks like this one. The oak trees that have taken root along the scarp's upper edge are worth noting; their presence along the line of an ancient boundary is a relatively common occurrence in the Irish landscape, where field edges and earthwork rims have provided undisturbed ground for centuries. The trees now serve as an accidental marker, tracing the arc of the enclosure even where the earthwork itself has been worn almost flat.