This rath at Clooneen, roughly 34 metres across, is the kind of early medieval settlement that generations of farmers have ploughed around, fenced beside, and quietly incorporated into the working landscape, to the point where the boundary of an old ringfort and the line of a modern field drain have become almost the same thing.

A rath is an earthen ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead built and occupied in Ireland roughly between the sixth and tenth centuries, though some were used earlier or later. They were the homes of farming families of modest status, the interior platform providing a raised, defensible space for a house, outbuildings, and livestock. At Clooneen, the enclosing element is an earthen scarp, a cut-and-built earthen bank that still stands to an external height of about 1.5 metres. Around its outer base runs a fosse, a defensive ditch, some 5.2 metres wide and 0.4 metres deep where it survives. That qualification matters: from the south-west round to the north-west, the fosse has disappeared entirely, replaced by a field boundary bank and drain running north to south along what was once the ditch's course. The two features have been folded together over centuries of agricultural use. On the southern side of the scarp, a slight ramp about 2 metres wide may preserve the line of the original entrance, the point where residents and animals once crossed the ditch and passed inside.