At Loonaghtan in north Galway, a circular rath sits on a north-facing grassland slope, its earthworks still present but worn down to the point where the ground reads as gently rumpled rather than deliberately engineered.

When surveyors visited in January 1985, the rath measured about 30 metres in diameter and retained its basic defensive anatomy: an inner scarp, a surrounding fosse (the ditch that separated the interior from the outer earthwork), and an outer bank. The bank itself still stood to between 0.6 and 1.5 metres in height, and two gaps were visible, one at the north-north-east measuring 5.5 metres wide and another at the south-east of 3.5 metres. A later field bank had been driven straight across the monument from north-north-west to south-south-east, a routine agricultural intrusion that cares nothing for the archaeology beneath it. The feeding pen occupied the eastern side of the site, sitting in the fosse itself. By the time of a follow-up visit in November 2001, the pen had been shifted: it was no longer inside the fosse but had been moved to just outside the outer bank to the east. The surveyors also noted a very shallow depression, roughly 3 metres wide and 0.3 metres deep, running from south-south-east to north-west, which may indicate the line of an additional outer fosse that had by then almost entirely disappeared into the hillside. Raths, the enclosed farmsteads of early medieval Ireland typically dating from roughly the sixth to the twelfth century, survive in enormous numbers across the country, but few offer quite such a legible record of incremental encroachment as this one, where the archaeology and the working farm have been quietly negotiating territory for decades.