The one at Bregoge in north Cork does almost the opposite. Its enclosing bank stands barely a quarter of a metre high, and the shallow ditch to its eastern side has been worn so gently into the ground that the whole structure reads less as a monument and more as a slight irregularity in a pasture slope. What saves it from invisibility is an accident of landscape: when the adjoining field on the far side of the stream valley has been ploughed, the circular form re-emerges as a soil mark, the buried outline of the ring printing itself in contrasting earth tones across the hillside.

A rath, as this type of site is formally classified, is the Irish term for a ringfort enclosed by an earthen bank rather than stone walling. These were the farmsteads of early medieval Ireland, typically dating from roughly the sixth to the twelfth centuries, built to shelter a family and their livestock within a defensible, or at least clearly bounded, enclosure. The Bregoge example measures approximately 34.5 metres east to west and 34.1 metres north to south, placing it within the ordinary size range for a single-family settlement. It sits on a south-facing slope above a stream valley, an orientation that would have offered both drainage and a degree of solar warmth, practical considerations that recur again and again in the siting of these structures across the Irish countryside. The grass-covered interior gives no obvious clue to whatever activity once took place within it.