It is easy to walk past without quite registering what you are looking at, which is part of what makes it worth pausing over.

This is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, the most common type of early medieval settlement monument in Ireland. Ringforts were typically the enclosed farmsteads of prosperous families, built from roughly the fifth to the twelfth century, their earthen banks providing a boundary as much social as defensive. The Ballinaclogh example measures approximately 22 metres across on its north-east to south-west axis and just under 20 metres on the north-west to south-east, making it a modest but complete specimen. The enclosing bank, now eroded to a height of around 1.2 metres, runs from north to east and from south to west. Along the western to northern arc, a stone wall sits directly on top of the bank line, and on the inner face of this section a low shelf of earth, called a berm, protrudes beneath the wall. That berm is likely the remnant of the original earthen bank, with the stone wall added later, either as a repair or a deliberate upgrade. The two phases of construction, one in earth and one in stone, survive side by side in the same feature, which is an unusually legible detail for a monument this worn.