At Cloghboley in County Galway, a site once large enough to qualify as a significant early medieval enclosure now shows almost nothing above the grass. What survives of the circular earthwork is a low stony bank stretching roughly four metres along the western edge, barely enough to suggest where the boundary once ran. The rest has gone under field-clearance rubble, the accumulated debris of generations of farmers tidying stones off their land and piling them wherever seemed convenient.

A rath, to use the Irish term, was a roughly circular enclosure of earth and sometimes stone, used as a farmstead during the early medieval period, broadly the fifth to twelfth centuries. This one was recorded by McCaffrey in 1952 as a circular earthen fort approximately 74 metres in diameter, its enclosing bank reinforced with a stone revetment, meaning the earthwork was faced or retained with stonework to give it stability. Within the eastern part of the interior, a house site was identified, suggesting the enclosed space was genuinely domestic in character rather than purely defensive. At 74 metres across, the enclosure would have been a reasonably substantial example of its type. A second rath lies immediately to the south-west, which hints that this part of Galway once supported a cluster of early medieval farmsteads, their inhabitants living within a short distance of one another across what is now ordinary agricultural ground.