At Cloonnagalleen in County Limerick, a rath, which is an early medieval earthen enclosure typically used as a defended farmstead, sits at the top of a hill within the grounds of a heritage theme park, its prehistoric dignity only slightly offset by the leisure infrastructure that now surrounds it. Two timber footbridges span the outer fosse, one to the east and one to the west, allowing visitors to step across the ditch and into the enclosure without scrambling down the banks, which was decidedly not how the original occupants would have intended entry to work.

The enclosure is roughly circular, measuring 29 metres north to south and 31 metres east to west, and is defined by an earthen bank with an external fosse, that is, a defensive ditch cut around the outside. The fosse runs to a depth of around 1.65 metres and a width of 1.9 metres, and a low field bank traces the outer edge. The bank itself survives to an internal height of 0.8 metres and an external height of 2.1 metres, and is best preserved along the arc running from the south-west to the north-east. A secondary low field bank follows the outer edge of the fosse. The site was compiled for record by Denis Power, with notes uploaded in August 2011, though the earthwork itself dates to a far earlier period, broadly the early medieval centuries when raths were constructed across Ireland in their tens of thousands as the basic unit of rural settlement.

The enclosure is incorporated into a park walking route, and the interior is level and grassed over, with an information board at its centre. A landscaped garden adjoins the site to the south. Given the managed setting, access is straightforward and the earthworks are easy to read at close quarters, particularly along the south-western to north-eastern stretch where the bank retains its most convincing profile. The fosse is shallow enough that its full width is visible from the interior, and walking the circuit of the bank gives a reasonable sense of the original scale and intention of the enclosure, even with the footbridges and the park walk threading through it.