The curve of a property fence along the north to south-east side of a pasture at Carrowneden is not an arbitrary line drawn by some farmer's convenience; it follows, almost exactly, the arc of an early medieval rath that has otherwise vanished entirely from the landscape. At ground level, no bank, no ditch, no raised ground betrays what was once here. The fence is the monument now.

A rath is a roughly circular enclosure, typically formed by an earthen bank and external ditch, used as a farmstead during the early medieval period in Ireland. The one at Carrowneden was broadly oval in plan, measuring somewhere between 45 and 60 metres across, and it was built on a north-east-facing slope of a north-west to south-east ridge. The 1916 Ordnance Survey six-inch map records the outline clearly enough, and that cartographic ghost is the main reason the enclosure can be identified at all today, the earthworks themselves having been levelled at some point since. What the original occupants would have had was a relatively level interior to the south and south-west, with the ground falling away to the north-east, and extensive open views in that same direction. The ridge behind them closed off the south-east. Eight metres to the south-south-west, a second rath has also been levelled, meaning two such enclosures once sat in close proximity on the same ridge, a pairing that raises questions about the relationship between their inhabitants that the surviving evidence cannot now answer.