This one, sitting in rolling pasture at Carrowroe in County Sligo, offers none of that. No fosse, no entrance feature, just a closed ring of earth and stone that keeps its own counsel.

The site encloses a roughly circular area of 23.5 metres in diameter, defined by a bank measuring about 2.55 metres wide. The internal height varies slightly, reaching 1.24 metres on the southern side and 1.1 metres to the north, with the external face standing at 1.24 metres. What makes the construction here particularly interesting is the revetting, a technique in which stones are set against a bank face to stabilise and retain it. Along the external face, running from the south-east around to the south-west, twenty stones have been placed into the base of the bank, each roughly 0.64 metres long. A smaller corresponding arrangement of five stones lines part of the interior face. Ringforts, known in Irish as raths when they are earthen rather than stone-built, were the most common form of enclosed farmstead in early medieval Ireland, typically housing a single family and their livestock. The care taken here with the stonework, however modest in scale, suggests a deliberate effort to shore up and maintain this particular enclosure over time. The northern boundary is now pressed close by modern development, which lends the site an odd quality: an early medieval farming enclosure quietly persisting beside the edges of contemporary Sligo.