The example at Woodpark in County Clare is one such site, a rath, which is the Irish term for a roughly circular earthen enclosure, typically defined by one or more banks and ditches. Built predominantly during the early medieval period, between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries, these enclosures served as farmsteads and settlement sites for farming families, the bank and ditch providing a degree of security for livestock as much as for people. Thousands survive in varying states of preservation across Clare alone, tucked into field boundaries, absorbed into farmland, or left to grass over in corners of townlands that farming never quite erased.