It is small, its walls barely visible above ground level, and yet it represents something quietly remarkable: the remains of a domestic building that has survived, in outline at least, for well over a thousand years.

A rath, sometimes called a ringfort, was the most common form of enclosed settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically a circular area of ground surrounded by one or more earthen banks and ditches, used to protect a farmstead and its occupants. Within the north-western quadrant of this particular example, a subrectangular structure has been identified, measuring roughly eight metres along its north-north-west to south-south-east axis and around five and a half metres across. The walls enclosing it are built from earth and stone, between 1.2 and 1.6 metres wide, though they rise only about 35 centimetres above the interior ground surface today. One end of the house, the north-north-western side, presses directly against the inner face of the rath's own bank, a detail that tells us something about how the space inside the enclosure was used and organised. Whoever lived here was making practical use of the available shelter, building against an existing boundary rather than setting the house free-standing in open ground.