This one in Kilmore, County Limerick, takes the opposite approach. Its defining edge is a low scarp, just a quarter of a metre high and four metres wide, so subtle that it blurs into the natural rise and fall of the surrounding pasture. To walk across this field without knowing what you were looking for would be to miss it entirely.

A rath, to use the Irish term, is an enclosed farmstead of the early medieval period, typically circular and defined by one or more earthen banks with accompanying ditches. They were the standard unit of rural settlement in Ireland from roughly the sixth to the twelfth century, and thousands survive in varying states of preservation. The Kilmore example sits on low-lying, level ground, with a low hill rising to the north-west and north. The sub-circular enclosure measures roughly 31 metres north to south and 36 metres east to west, and the scarp that traces its perimeter is best read along the southern to northern arc, where it holds its shape most clearly. Denis Power, who compiled the site record uploaded in August 2011, notes that elsewhere the edge becomes genuinely difficult to separate from ordinary ground undulation. A farm passage now runs close to the western side, following the line of a field boundary that has since been removed, which has likely contributed to the wear on that part of the monument.

Accessing the site means crossing private farmland, so any visit would require permission from the landowner. The interior, currently under pasture, slopes down very gently towards the west-south-west, a detail worth holding in mind when trying to orient yourself on the ground. The best strategy for reading the scarp is to move slowly along the southern edge, where the ground evidence is most coherent, and to crouch low if the light allows it. A low raking sun, the kind that arrives in the early morning or late afternoon of a clear day, throws shallow earthworks into relief in a way that midday light simply does not. There is not much to see here in any conventional sense, but that is precisely the point; this is a site that rewards patience and a willingness to look closely at very quiet evidence.