Not in some quiet field or on a remote hillside, but folded into the fabric of a Co. Mayo town, its ancient earthworks pressed up against garden walls and property fences, its outer bank disappearing in places beneath hawthorn, blackthorn, and bramble.

A ringfort, or rath, is an enclosed circular settlement typical of early medieval Ireland, usually consisting of a raised interior platform defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches. This one is a neat circle, 32 metres across in both directions, and its main bank remains substantial: up to 2.4 metres high on the eastern side and 3 metres wide, with an outer fosse, a ditch that would originally have made the whole enclosure considerably more imposing. A further external bank runs around the outside, though it survives in anything like its original form only along the south-western to north-western arc. Elsewhere, it has been absorbed into boundary fences or lost altogether. A section on the south side was destroyed during housing construction and later rebuilt. The original entrance was almost certainly at the north-north-east, where a 3-metre gap in the inner bank aligns with a causeway across the fosse, though the corresponding gap in the outer bank has since been blocked by a property boundary. Close to the southern bank, there is a possible souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber that in early medieval Ireland served variously for storage, refuge, or ventilation.

The interior remains grassy and open, sloping gently down toward the north-east, and the elevated position of the site, with ground falling away to the north, would have made practical sense to whoever built here, perhaps over a thousand years ago. What is quietly striking is how much of the structure endures, even as the town has grown up and around it on every side.