But this roughly circular raised area in Drom townland, Co. Kerry, is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead built and occupied largely during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. The earthen bank that defines it, about 1.2 metres wide and rising some 1.4 metres on its outer face, encloses an interior space of approximately 26 metres north to south and 24 metres east to west. A gap on the south-eastern side may mark the original entrance, though the whole structure is now heavily overgrown, its interior a dense mat of ferns.

What gives this particular site an additional layer of interest is the documentary trace left behind it. In the 1940s, three raths were recorded in Drom townland through the Schools Manuscript collection, a large folk-history project that gathered local knowledge across Ireland, including records of field monuments held in living memory or local tradition. At that time, the three ringforts in Drom were distributed across land belonging to three members of the Cooper family: Clem. T. Cooper, John G. Cooper, and Florence T. Cooper. That detail, precise and slightly unexpected, gives a human texture to what is otherwise an ancient and largely anonymous earthwork. The landscape has shifted around it since then; field boundaries now abut the bank on its northern and southern sides, and rubble from field clearance has been piled against the outer face of the bank at the north-north-east and south-south-west, the ordinary accumulation of a working farm gradually pressing up against something far older.