A grass-covered circle twenty-two metres across sits quietly on a north-facing slope at Carrickanure in County Waterford, its earthen bank so overgrown that a passing walker might read it as nothing more than a slight rise in the ground. It is, in fact, a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, the kind of enclosed farmstead that tens of thousands of early medieval families across Ireland built and lived within, most commonly between roughly 500 and 1000 AD. What makes this one worth pausing over is the unevenness of its survival: the bank is reasonably intact along the eastern and southern arc, running about four metres wide with an internal height of half a metre and an external height of around seventy centimetres, but by the time it reaches the north it has been worn down to little more than a scarp, a low abrupt slope of between sixty centimetres and a metre.

The entrance gap, 1.8 metres wide, faces east-south-east, a common enough orientation for ringforts, thought by some scholars to reflect a preference for morning light or simply to face away from prevailing westerly weather. Typically a ringfort of this type would have been accompanied by a fosse, a surrounding ditch that provided both the material for building the bank and an additional line of enclosure, but no fosse is visible here. Whether it was never dug, has silted entirely, or lies hidden beneath the turf is difficult to say without excavation. The site sits on a spur running south to north, with the enclosed area occupying ground that levels off on the slope, a practical choice that would have given the original inhabitants a degree of natural elevation without the exposure of a true hilltop.