It is easy to overlook, measuring roughly ten metres by six, and defined not by standing walls but by low earthen banks, a scarped edge, and a slight change in ground level. Yet those modest features, read carefully, describe something once domestic and ordinary: a place where someone lived.

A rath, sometimes called a ringfort, is a circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, built and occupied primarily during the early medieval period in Ireland, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. They served as farmsteads, the defended homesteads of farming families. Within the Skreen Beg rath, the house sits against the north-north-eastern bank of the enclosure, projecting inward from it. Its north-eastern wall is formed by the rath bank itself, while its south-eastern and south-western sides are marked by a low bank of earth and stone, surviving to an internal height of around half a metre. A one-metre-wide break in the south-western bank indicates where the original entrance once stood. On the western half of the structure, the floor level sits slightly lower than the surrounding interior of the rath, while the eastern half is roughly level with it, a detail that hints at how the building was set into or shaped around the existing ground.