On a north-west-facing slope in pastureland near the Galway coast, a ringfort once stood that measured roughly 45.7 metres in diameter. A rath, as these earthen enclosures are known, was typically a circular bank of raised earth enclosing a farmstead or family settlement, often accompanied by a fosse, or defensive ditch, running around the outside. At Rinville, all of that has gone. The ground has been levelled, the bank absorbed back into the field, and no surface trace of any kind survives.

The site has a modest paper trail. Writing in 1914, a researcher named Athy noted the presence of a fosse and an outer bank, even then observing that both features had already disappeared. By 1952, McCaffrey was classifying it as a circular earthen fort with an entrance gap on the western side, though by that stage the structure was presumably already well on its way to erasure. What is left now exists only from the air. The outline of the rath remains clearly visible on aerial photography, a ghostly circular shadow pressed into the pasture, the kind of trace that only becomes legible when you remove yourself far enough from the ground to stop looking at the grass and start reading what lies beneath it.