The example at Dromada in County Mayo is one such site, a rath, which is the Irish term for a roughly circular earthwork enclosure, typically consisting of one or more banks and ditches thrown up around a farmstead or dwelling during the early medieval period, broadly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. These were not military fortifications in the conventional sense but rather enclosed farmyards, markers of status and security for the families who built and lived within them.

Dromada sits in the west of Ireland, in a county whose landscape still carries the faint outlines of early medieval life in its fields and hillsides. Raths of this kind were the basic unit of rural settlement for much of early Christian Ireland, home to the farming families who worked the surrounding land and kept cattle within the enclosing banks at night. The earthen banks served as much as a boundary marker and a deterrent to livestock theft as anything else. What distinguishes any individual rath from its thousands of counterparts is usually a matter of local topography, the number of enclosing banks, or later historical associations, details that in the case of Dromada remain to be fully documented and made widely available.

For those who do find their way to the area, the experience of locating a rath in the field is often quieter and more ambiguous than expected. These monuments rarely announce themselves. A slight rise in a pasture, a curving line of older vegetation, or a dip where a ditch once ran are frequently all that marks a site that was, a thousand years ago, someone's home.