Tucked within this same townland, and considerably less remarked upon, is a ringfort, the type of enclosed settlement that was the standard farmstead form across early medieval Ireland, roughly from the fifth to the twelfth centuries. A rath, as this kind of earthwork ringfort is known, typically consists of a roughly circular bank and ditch enclosing a domestic area where a family and their animals would have lived. Thousands survive across Ireland in varying states of preservation, yet each one represents a specific household, a specific patch of ground, chosen and worked by people whose names are now lost.

What makes this particular example quietly arresting is its location. To build or occupy a farmstead at Carrowmore was to live among monuments that were already ancient, the megalithic tombs having been constructed thousands of years before any early medieval farmer arrived. Whether those inhabitants understood what surrounded them, feared it, or simply incorporated it into their daily landscape is unknowable, but the proximity is suggestive. The townland name itself, Carrowmore, derives from the Irish An Cheathrú Mhór, meaning the large quarter, a reference to a land division rather than to the archaeology, though the two have become inseparable in how the area is understood today.