But the roughly circular enclosure at Doonvullen Upper, with a diameter of around thirty metres, is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, and the form it takes today is a good illustration of how these early medieval earthworks fade quietly into the agricultural landscape rather than declare themselves as monuments.

Ringforts were typically enclosed farmsteads, built and occupied during the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries, and they survive in their thousands across Ireland. The one at Doonvullen Upper was recorded in detail by Denis Power and uploaded to the national sites and monuments record in November 2013. The earthen bank that defines its circuit measures around four metres wide, with an internal height of just twenty-five centimetres and an external height of seventy centimetres. Around the outside runs a fosse, which is simply a ditch, here with a basal width of just over a metre, a total width of nearly five metres, and a depth of forty-five centimetres. Those are modest dimensions, and the bank itself has been further reduced in places to a scarped, or cut-away, edge, the result of cattle poaching, meaning the slow compaction and erosion caused by livestock walking repeatedly over the same ground.

The monument sits in rough, level pasture and is now so obscured by thorn growth that the enclosure shape, clearly legible on the older Ordnance Survey twenty-five-inch map, requires some patience to read on the ground. That older mapping layer is, in fact, a useful companion for anyone trying to locate and understand what they are looking at: the circular form shows clearly in that historic cartographic record even if the earthworks themselves have become indistinct through a combination of vegetation and grazing pressure. There are no visitor facilities and no formal access, so this is the kind of site best approached with landowner permission and a reasonable tolerance for wet ground.