What was once a rath, the Irish term for a roughly circular earthwork enclosure typically used as a farmstead during the early medieval period, now survives only as a slight scarp in the grass, a low shelf in the ground where the old bank once stood before it was levelled.

The site at Parsonstown measures approximately 27 metres in diameter, its semi-circular outline recorded on the Ordnance Survey Ireland 25-inch map, a large-scale series produced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that captured many earthworks still intact at that time. By the time satellite imagery was taken between 2011 and 2013, no surface remains of the earthwork were visible. The levelling of raths across Ireland was common throughout the twentieth century as agricultural land was drained, consolidated, and put to more intensive use. What the Parsonstown rath once enclosed, and how long it had survived before being cleared, is not recorded.

There is something quietly instructive about a site like this. The scarp alone, that barely perceptible change in ground level, is what connects the present field to a settlement perhaps fifteen hundred years old. Nothing marks it out to a passing eye.