The rath at Ballysheen, Co. Wexford, belongs to the second category. Sitting on a gentle west-facing slope, it has left almost nothing visible at ground level, yet aerial photography reveals the ghost of a roughly circular enclosure about thirty metres across, outlined by a single fosse, the ditch that would once have ringed the interior and defined its boundary.

A rath, sometimes called a ringfort, is the commonest monument type in the Irish landscape, a circular enclosure of earth or stone used primarily as a farmstead during the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries. Most were defined by one or more raised banks with a corresponding outer ditch. At Ballysheen, the bank itself has long since been levelled, but the fosse below survives as a cropmark, a place where buried soil differences cause crops to grow slightly differently, producing a pattern only legible from altitude. What makes this site additionally interesting is its relationship with a second rath immediately to the south. The two enclosures are conjoined, sharing what appears to be a boundary, a pairing that hints at something more complex than a single farmstead, perhaps successive phases of occupation, or related households living in deliberate proximity.