The rath at Ballygowan in County Kilkenny is one such site. A rath is a roughly circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, typically dating from the period between the fifth and twelfth centuries, and serving as a farmstead rather than a military fortification in any formal sense. That so many survive at all is partly because later generations regarded them with enough unease, associating them with the fairies and the otherworld, to leave them largely undisturbed.

Ballygowan itself is a placename found in several Irish counties, derived from the Irish Baile Gobhann, meaning the townland of the smith, which suggests a working agricultural and craft community in the area during the early medieval period. Without more detailed survey information it is not possible to say precisely how many banks define this particular enclosure, what its diameter is, or whether any internal features such as souterrains, the underground stone-lined passages sometimes found within raths and used for storage or refuge, have been recorded here. What can be said is that its classification as a rath places it within a category of monument that forms the backbone of early Irish rural settlement, each one once the home of a farming family of middling rank in the complex social hierarchy of Gaelic Ireland.