The rath at Ballynahistil, in County Galway, offers something rather more austere. Set on a low rise in flat pastureland, it survives now as little more than a ghost of a monument, its earthen bank so worn and interrupted that only sections of the circuit remain legible to the eye.

A rath is an early medieval enclosure, typically of the first millennium AD, formed by a bank and ditch thrown up around a farmstead or settlement. In its original state the Ballynahistil example would have formed a roughly circular enclosure about 35 metres across. What remains of the bank is slight, reaching less than a metre in external height and little more than half a metre on the interior, with a base width of around seven and a half metres suggesting the earthwork was once considerably more substantial. Only the arc running from the north-east around to the south-east, and a further stretch from the south to the west, can still be made out at ground level. Immediately to the south-east, an old angled field boundary may relate to the same early landscape, though the connection is uncertain.

For anyone willing to look carefully, there is something quietly instructive about a site this worn. The very flatness of the surrounding land means the slight rise on which the rath sits is still perceptible, and that small elevation, chosen deliberately by whoever built here, is perhaps the most legible thing the place has left to offer.