The rath at Coolnacrutta, in County Kilkenny, does the opposite. It sits on the flat, reclaimed floor of the Goul river valley, surrounded by fields that have been cultivated right up to the base of its earthen bank. That low-lying setting gives it an oddly domestic quality, as though it was built not to survey the country but simply to mark out a piece of it.

A rath is an early medieval enclosure, typically dating from roughly the fifth to the twelfth century, formed by a circular earthen bank and an outer ditch known as a fosse. The bank at Coolnacrutta is modest but intact: roughly twenty-five metres in diameter, about four metres wide, and standing to a height of around one and a half metres both inside and out. What is missing is the fosse. The outer ditch was still visible when the Ordnance Survey mapped the area at six-inch scale in 1899, but it has since been filled in, almost certainly as part of the agricultural improvement of the surrounding fields. A gap of about three metres in the western part of the bank is thought to be a modern intrusion rather than an original entrance. Between the filled fosse and the cultivated fields pressing close on all sides, the monument has been quietly reduced over the decades, yet the circular earthwork itself survives, holding its shape in a valley that has otherwise been thoroughly reshaped by farming.