The one at Templemary, in north Cork, sits in level pasture and announces itself not through dramatic earthworks but through a gentle rise in the ground, a circular platform roughly thirty metres across, its edges defined by a low scarp that reaches just over a metre at its highest point. A shallow external fosse, the term for the ditch typically dug to throw up the enclosing bank of a rath, traces an arc from the south-south-west around to the north-east, fading to almost nothing on the western and north-eastern sides.

A rath, to use the Irish term, was typically a farmstead of the early medieval period, enclosed by one or more earthen banks and ditches to mark territory, provide shelter, and keep livestock secure. What makes Templemary quietly interesting is what happened to it long after its original inhabitants had gone. The interior is crossed by the remains of cultivation ridges running roughly north-north-west to south-south-east, a pattern of lazy-bed or ridge-and-furrow farming that did not stop at the edge of the old enclosure but continued outward across the bank and into the surrounding field. Someone, at some point in the post-medieval centuries, simply ploughed through it, treating the ancient earthwork as farmland like any other. The result is a landscape palimpsest, two entirely different periods of agricultural activity layered into the same small patch of ground, each faintly legible if you know what to look for.