The rath at Ballygowan in County Mayo is one such site, a circular enclosure of the kind that would have served as a defended farmstead during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. A rath, to give the technical term its due, typically consists of one or more earthen banks and ditches thrown up around a central living area, and in their day these structures were the ordinary domestic architecture of the farming classes. That so many survive at all is partly because later generations tended to leave them alone, whether out of practical inconvenience or the older superstition that ringforts were fairy dwellings best left undisturbed.

Ballygowan itself is a townland name found in several parts of Ireland, derived from the Irish Baile Gobhann, meaning the settlement or homestead of the smith. The presence of a rath here fits the pattern of early medieval rural settlement common throughout Connacht, where such enclosures were built by farming families to protect their household, their livestock, and whatever modest wealth they held. Mayo as a county contains hundreds of these features, many of them sitting quietly in fields that have been worked around them for centuries, their banks softened by time and vegetation but their outlines still readable from above or at an angle in low winter light.