The rath at Tiraninny, in County Mayo, is one such place: a circular earthwork enclosure of the kind that would have served as a farmstead or defended homestead during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. A rath, to use the Irish term, typically consists of one or more earthen banks and ditches thrown up around a central living area, the whole thing acting as a boundary marker, a status symbol, and a practical barrier against livestock theft or low-level raiding.

Tiraninny sits in the west of Ireland, in a county whose boggy uplands and drumlin-scattered lowlands contain a remarkable density of such monuments, many of them poorly documented and rarely visited. Mayo was densely settled in the early medieval period, and the ringforts that survive there reflect a dispersed pattern of rural life in which individual farming families occupied enclosed homesteads spread across the countryside rather than clustering into villages. The earthworks at Tiraninny belong to that broad tradition, though the specific history of this particular enclosure, who built it, when exactly it was raised, and what became of the people who lived within it, remains to be more fully examined and recorded.