The one at Ballynabucky in County Galway is a quiet example of the type, and all the more worth pausing over for its very ordinariness. Sitting on a south-east-facing slope amid level pastureland, it reads in the landscape as little more than a grassy ring, yet it marks the site of an enclosed farmstead that was almost certainly occupied during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries.

A rath, as this class of monument is known, is essentially a circular enclosure defined by an earthen bank and, sometimes, an outer ditch, built to protect a homestead, its livestock, and its inhabitants. The Ballynabucky example measures roughly 28.7 metres in diameter and is defined by a bank of earth and stone that survives in fair condition. One detail invites a moment of scrutiny: a gap of about 2.3 metres on the south-east side, which may be a modern intrusion rather than the original entrance. That small uncertainty is characteristic of sites like this, where centuries of farming, livestock movement, and gradual neglect have quietly altered what was once a carefully constructed boundary. The site was recorded by McCaffrey in 1952, catalogued as number 97 in that survey.