But the cashel at An Cúíl Iarthach is one of those quiet survivals that repays a closer look. A cashel is a ringfort built from stone rather than earth and timber, the kind of enclosed farmstead that thousands of early medieval Irish families would have known as simply home. This one sits on a natural knoll in rough grazing land, and its builders were economical in the way that good builders tend to be: where rock outcrops broke the surface to the north-east and south-south-west, they incorporated them directly into the circuit of the wall rather than working around them.

The enclosure is roughly circular, about twenty-six metres across, and the wall itself still stands to around 1.4 metres along the surviving stretch from south-south-west to north-east. The southern and south-western sides are reinforced not by construction but by geology, a natural scarp dropping away below the wall line and making the site more defensible, or at least more imposing, without any additional effort. Inside, the ground slopes gently down towards the south-east, and in the northern half there are traces of what may have been a hut site, the faint suggestion of a domestic interior within what is now open hillside. A lane still skirts the site along its north-eastern and southern edges, the kind of detail that hints at a long continuity of use in the landscape around a place, even after the place itself has been quietly forgotten.