Near Cherryville in County Kildare, a field that has long since lost all outward sign of whatever once occupied it still carries an old name: 'The Rath'. That name alone has kept a minor archaeological puzzle alive, because the field in question is rectangular in shape, and a rath, in Irish usage, typically refers to a ringfort, which is circular. The shape and the name do not obviously fit together.

The field appears on an 1839 manuscript map drawn by Brownrigg and Longfield, now held in the National Library of Ireland. It sits mid-way down a south-facing pasture slope of moderate steepness, overlooking boggy, wet ground to the south. No earthworks or surface traces survive today. The rectangular outline recorded on the map raises the possibility that this was a moated site rather than a ringfort. Moated sites, which were typically enclosed by a water-filled ditch and associated with Anglo-Norman manorial settlement in the medieval period, do tend towards rectangular plans. It is equally possible, though, that a ringfort once stood here and gave the field its name, with the rectangular boundary being simply that of the field itself rather than of any earlier enclosure. Without excavation, neither reading can be confirmed or ruled out.