That small indignity tells you something about the fate of many ringforts across the Irish countryside, where the demands of farming have gradually worn down monuments that were already old when the Normans arrived.

The site near Castlegar is a subcircular rath, roughly 40 metres east to west and 35 metres north to south, defined by an earthen bank and an external fosse, the fosse being a ditch dug around the outside of the bank to reinforce the enclosure. Ringforts of this kind were the standard form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically housing a farming family and their livestock within a defended enclosure. This one is described as poorly preserved, and the agricultural boundary that overlies the fosse from the east-south-east around through the south to the south-west has done its share of the damage. It sits some 200 metres south-east of another ringfort, a pairing that is not especially rare in Galway, where clusters of such enclosures sometimes reflect extended family groupings or successive generations occupying adjacent plots of land. The interior is now densely planted with trees, which at once obscures the ground detail and, in a roundabout way, protects what remains of the earthworks beneath from further disturbance.