The rath at Burgatia, in County Cork, is one such place. A rath is a ringfort of earthen construction, typically a raised circular enclosure bounded by one or more banks and ditches, built during the early medieval period as a farmstead or place of modest status. They were not military fortifications in any grand sense, but the homes and enclosures of farming families, and the fact that so many survive at all speaks to the durability of compacted earth and the occasional reluctance of later generations to disturb them.