The one at Meenleana, in County Galway, does almost the opposite. Sitting on a north-facing slope of a ridge above a stream, it has quietly dissolved into the grassland around it, leaving only the faintest impression that anything was ever there.

A rath, as ringforts of this earthen construction are properly called, was typically a circular or near-circular enclosure defined by one or more raised banks with a ditch, known as a fosse, dug between them. They served as farmsteads throughout early medieval Ireland, enclosing a household and its outbuildings within a defended boundary. The example at Meenleana was originally subcircular, measuring roughly 52.5 metres north to south and 49 metres east to west, and had two banks with an intervening fosse running from the south-west through the north and around to the east. Recorded by Neary in 1914, it was already poorly preserved at that point. Today, beyond a low rise at the southern edge, no visible surface trace survives across most of the circuit. The gaps now visible at the south-west and east may be modern breaks rather than original entrances, and field walls have been pushed through the monument at the north-east and south, cutting across what earthworks may once have remained. The site sits in a working agricultural landscape, and the slow accumulation of ploughing, drainage, and boundary-setting over generations has gradually reduced it to near-invisibility.