What was once a deliberate and socially significant enclosure has been tidied into the field system so thoroughly that the original entrance can no longer be made out, and the interior has been planted with trees. It is the kind of place that rewards a second look precisely because, at first glance, it no longer looks like anything much at all.

The site is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead typically built during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Thousands of them survive across Ireland in varying states of preservation. A rath of this kind would originally have consisted of a raised internal area, a surrounding earthen bank, and a fosse, that is, a ditch dug to reinforce the bank and mark the boundary of the enclosure. At Edergole, both the bank and the fosse remain, but they have been modernised and incorporated into the field boundary, which means the original form is still legible in the landscape if you know what you are looking at, even if the site itself has been considerably altered. An interior diameter of 47 metres places it on the larger end of the typical range for such enclosures, which commonly ran between 20 and 60 metres across.