What makes this site in Ballyglass, County Westmeath quietly interesting is what sits at the centre of one such ringfort, a rectangular house site nested inside the circular enclosure like a room within a room.

The house site measures roughly 6.2 metres from east-northeast to west-southwest and 5 metres across, enclosed by an earth and stone bank approximately 1.7 metres wide. A slight gap of around 1.2 metres on the east-northeastern side is thought to represent an original entrance. To the south-southeast of the southern corner, two upright stones remain in place, their precise function unrecorded but their survival across however many centuries quietly notable. The whole arrangement sits on a low rise in what is now pasture, the kind of unassuming ground that holds a great deal of early medieval Irish domestic life once you begin to look carefully at the contours beneath the grass. Ringforts, known in Irish as raths or liosanna, were typically the enclosed farmsteads of farming families during the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries, and finding a defined rectangular structure at the heart of one offers a glimpse of the internal organisation of such a settlement.