The one at Lehurick, in north County Galway, fits that template in almost every respect, yet one detail refuses to cooperate: a large pond occupies the entire eastern portion of the monument, swallowing the enclosing earthworks where they would otherwise complete the circuit. That is not typical farmstead behaviour.

The enclosure sits on a south-east-facing slope in open pastureland, and measures roughly 43.5 metres north to south and 41 metres east to west, making it a substantial structure. It is defined by three banks with two intervening fosses, the ditches that would have been dug to raise the banks on either side, though the inner bank survives only at the north-east. Elsewhere the boundary reduces to a scarp, a natural or cut slope rather than a built-up earthwork. A causewayed entrance, a gap in the earthworks approached by a raised crossing, opens at the south. More puzzling still is a triangular-shaped pit that sits outside the outer bank at the north-west, unexplained and categorised simply as enigmatic. The morphology, taken on its own, points towards a ringfort. But the deliberate incorporation of the pond into the eastern arc of the monument has prompted archaeologists to consider whether this place may have served a ceremonial or ritual purpose rather than, or perhaps alongside, a purely domestic one. Water features, particularly ponds and lakes, held considerable significance in prehistoric and early medieval Ireland, associated with votive deposits and boundary-crossing in ways that domestic enclosures generally were not. Whether the pond was already present when the earthworks were laid out, or was in some way created or managed as part of the design, is not currently known.