What catches the eye is the planting: the bank has been ringed with trees at some point since the site ceased to function as a dwelling, giving the enclosure an almost formal, parkland quality that sits oddly against its ancient origins.

This is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, the most common type of early medieval farmstead found across Ireland. Typically constructed between roughly the sixth and tenth centuries, raths were enclosed homesteads in which a family, their animals, and their stores were protected by one or more circular or oval earthen banks. The Ballyregan example is oval rather than circular, measuring approximately 45.8 metres east to west and 39.4 metres north to south, enclosed by a bank of earth and stone standing around 1.2 metres high. That the bank survives at all, and at a reasonable height, is partly a consequence of the site sitting on elevated ground, away from the kind of intensive tillage that has levelled so many comparable monuments elsewhere in Munster. Tens of thousands of ringforts once dotted the Irish countryside; a great many have been ploughed out or built over, so a reasonably intact example, even a modest one, carries a certain weight.