The rath at Carrowbleagh, County Sligo, does something quieter and, in its own way, more telling. Much of its enclosing bank has been quietly cannibalised over the centuries, absorbed into what it bordered rather than preserved apart from it, and along one arc it has been so thoroughly flattened by the presence of a modern road that it is barely visible at all.

A rath is an early medieval enclosure, typically dating from roughly the fifth to the twelfth century, built from banked earth and stone to define a farmstead and offer a degree of protection for people and livestock. The Carrowbleagh example is circular, with a diameter of twenty-one metres, enclosed by a bank of earth and stone ranging from about three and a half to six and a half metres in width and surviving to an internal height of between twenty centimetres and one point three metres. That variation in height tells part of the story. The bank incorporates a considerable amount of field clearance debris, meaning generations of farmers have used the old enclosure as a convenient dumping ground for stones turned up during ploughing and grazing, layering practical agriculture over a much older structure. Along the northern edge, a few large stones protruding from the bank may be the last remnants of a kerb, the kind of stone facing that would originally have given the bank a more defined outer edge. There is no fosse, the encircling ditch that often accompanies a rath, and the original entrance has long since been lost, absorbed or erased by the same incremental processes of reuse and forgetting that have softened the rest of the site.