The trees follow the line of an earthen bank, and once you know what you are looking at, the geometry becomes unmistakable: a rath, or ringfort, its circular outline still legible in the landscape despite centuries of agricultural activity around it.

Ringforts are among the most common archaeological monuments in Ireland, with tens of thousands recorded across the country. They were typically built during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries, and served as enclosed farmsteads, their earthen banks defining the boundary of a family's domestic space and providing some protection for livestock. This particular example measures about 27.5 metres in diameter, with a worn bank still standing to around 1.1 metres in height. That the bank survives at all, even in a reduced state, is partly down to the trees planted along it, which have helped stabilise the earthwork while also, in a way, disguising it. The interior has been planted too, so the whole enclosure now reads more as a small woodland than as a piece of early medieval settlement archaeology.

The site sits in pasture, and the farmyard immediately to its north gives a sense of how continuously this land has been worked. The rath and the farm are, in that respect, variations on the same impulse across very different centuries.