The rath at Rathedmond, in County Sligo, is one of these, a circular earthwork enclosure of the kind that once defined the Irish rural landscape so thoroughly that the word rath embedded itself into place names the length of the country.

A rath, to use the Irish term, is a ringfort built primarily from earth, its boundary formed by one or more raised banks with accompanying ditches. These were not military fortifications in any grand sense. They were farmsteads, the enclosed yard of an early medieval household, protecting livestock from wolves and neighbours alike, and marking the social standing of the family within. Rathedmond itself carries the element rath openly in its name, suggesting the monument was prominent enough, and old enough, to shape how people identified the place long after the original occupants were gone. Sligo's landscape, bounded by limestone uplands and river valleys running toward the Atlantic, contains many such survivals, the earthworks of early medieval settlement sitting quietly in fields that have been worked continuously for centuries since.