This one, sitting on a gentle rise in the grassland of Curraghaun in north Galway, requires more imagination than most. What survives is fragmentary: a partial bank to the west, a scarp tracing the arc from east through south to the west-south-west, and a fosse, the defensive ditch that once ran around the outside of the enclosure, still faintly legible along part of the southern side. Elsewhere, the enclosing elements have vanished entirely into the field.

A rath is an early medieval farmstead enclosed by one or more earthen banks, typically circular or oval in plan, and thousands of them survive across Ireland in varying states of preservation. This example was originally oval, measuring roughly 26 metres on its north-south axis. It has long carried a local name, Cuniffe's Fort, a reference recorded by Neary as early as 1914. That kind of informal naming is common with ringforts throughout Ireland; long after the archaeology fades from view, the folk memory of a distinct, bounded place tends to persist in placenames and in conversation. The fort at Curraghaun is, by any archaeological measure, very poorly preserved, yet Neary's record shows it was already a known and named feature in the landscape over a century ago.