This one in Ballysakeery, County Mayo, breaks that pattern almost perversely. It sits at the base of a south-west-facing slope, tucked into a narrow east-west valley of wet ground, beside a stream that doubles as a townland boundary. Whatever logic placed a settlement here, it was not the logic of visibility or dominance.

A rath is an earthen ringfort, typically dating from the early medieval period, roughly 500 to 1000 AD, and used as a farmstead enclosure rather than a military fortification. This example encloses a circular area somewhere between twenty and twenty-five metres in diameter, surrounded by an earthen bank that survives in noticeably uneven condition. On the northern half, the bank retains a reasonable profile, around five metres wide with an external height of just over a metre. To the south and south-west it has slumped considerably, reduced in places to little more than a low scarp barely half a metre above the surrounding ground. A modern field fence cuts straight across the interior on a north-north-east to south-south-west axis, bisecting the enclosed space and adding another layer of alteration to a structure already worn by centuries of agricultural use. Gorse and brambles have colonised the bank and taken over much of the western half of the interior, making any close inspection of those areas difficult. Approximately a hundred metres to the south-west, on higher ground, there is a second possible rath, the two sites sitting within easy sight of one another across the valley.

The encroaching scrub and the dividing fence mean that reading the site on the ground requires some patience. The northern arc of the bank, being the best preserved, gives the clearest sense of the original scale of the enclosure, while the stream running nearby remains the most legible boundary feature of all, still marking the edge of the townland just as it presumably marked something meaningful to whoever chose this damp valley floor as a place to settle.