At Knockogonnell in County Galway, what survives of a subcircular rath sits on a north-east-facing slope in gently rolling grassland, and it takes a patient eye to read it at all. A rath is an early medieval enclosed farmstead, typically circular and defined by one or more earthen banks with an external fosse, or ditch. Here, that basic form is just legible, measuring roughly 42 metres north to south and 37.4 metres east to west, but the site is classed as very poorly preserved, and the evidence for that assessment is written clearly across the ground.

The external fosse, the ditch that would once have ringed the enclosure and given the bank its material, survives only along the eastern arc through south to south-west. The bank itself has fared no better. From the north-east around to the south-east, a later field boundary has been laid directly on top of it, folding the early medieval feature into the post-medieval agricultural geometry of the area. At the north-west, the bank has disappeared altogether. What remains of the interior has been further disturbed by a large modern pit, some two metres deep, cut into the north-east sector. The cumulative effect is of a monument that has been slowly disaggregated by every generation that came after the people who built it, each leaving their own mark without necessarily knowing what lay beneath.