The example at Curragh More in County Galway is one such site, a rath sitting in a landscape whose very place name offers a clue to its setting. Curragh, from the Irish currach, typically refers to open, marshy, or unenclosed ground, the kind of terrain that early medieval farming communities knew how to read and use carefully.

Raths were the enclosed farmsteads of early medieval Ireland, dating broadly from around the fifth to the twelfth centuries. A typical rath consisted of a roughly circular area defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, inside which a family and their livestock would have sheltered. They were not primarily military structures, though the enclosure offered some protection; they were domestic spaces, markers of social standing, and boundaries between the managed world and the wider landscape beyond. Galway's terrain, with its mix of boggy lowland and rocky upland, preserves a particularly varied collection of these monuments, some barely visible as cropmarks, others still rising clearly from the ground as substantial earthworks.