It is an oddly literal collision of the ancient and the practical, and it tells you something about how rural infrastructure has accumulated across the Irish countryside over centuries, often without much regard for what lay beneath the surface.

The site near Stuckeen in County Mayo is a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead typically built between the early medieval period and around 1000 AD. These were usually circular or oval in plan, surrounded by one or more earthen banks and ditches to define and protect a domestic space. Here, the enclosure measures roughly 58 metres north to south and 51 metres east to west, which places it at the larger end of the ordinary range. The outer fosse, a dry ditch dug to reinforce the bank's height from the outside, still survives to a depth of around 1.4 metres in places, and the bank itself stands to about 1.5 metres where it has not been disturbed. That disturbance, unfortunately, has been considerable. The two roads entering the interior have broken through the bank and fosse on the northern, eastern, and western sides, and the entire southern half of the enclosure has been levelled. What remains is a partial earthwork in undulating pasture, the surviving arc of bank just legible enough to suggest the original circuit.