The one at Castlegar in County Galway took a different turn. At some point after its original construction, somebody decided it was worth improving, not as a defensive enclosure but as a decorative feature, and so stone steps were cut into the gaps of the inner and outer banks, a later wall was raised on top of the inner bank, and the outer face of the outermost bank was reinforced with stonework. The result is a site that sits somewhere between ancient monument and Georgian garden folly, its original purpose overlaid with the aesthetic ambitions of a demesne landscape.

A rath, as ringforts of this earthen type are commonly called, is essentially a circular enclosure defined by one or more banks and ditches, used in early medieval Ireland typically as a farmstead or defended residence. This particular example is around thirty metres in diameter and is defined by three banks and three corresponding fosses, making it a more elaborate construction than the single-bank variety that appears most frequently across the Irish countryside. It sits within what was the Castlegar Demesne, the managed estate grounds of a landed property, and it is in that demesne context that its later modification makes sense. Landowners of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries frequently incorporated ancient earthworks into their pleasure grounds, treating them as picturesque curiosities. Here, the insertion of stone steps into the bank gaps suggests the rath was made walkable and presentable, a feature to be strolled around and admired rather than simply grazed over. Within the interior, a low circular mound of around eighteen metres in diameter is still visible, along with traces of a structure recorded simply as "Cottage" on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, adding another layer of use to an already complicated site. A second ringfort lies roughly 130 metres to the north-east, suggesting this corner of Galway was once a well-settled early medieval landscape.