Somewhere between a farm boundary and a piece of early medieval Ireland, the earthwork at Broadleas Commons occupies an awkward middle ground. A modern agricultural shed now sits in the western part of its interior, which is about as frank a statement as you will find about the fate of many Irish ringforts over the past century or two.

A rath is a roughly circular enclosure, typically formed by one or more earthen banks and ditches, used during the early medieval period as a defended farmstead or high-status homestead. The site at Broadleas Commons appears to have once been a bivallate example, meaning it had two concentric enclosing banks rather than the more common single ring. The first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, published in 1838, recorded it as a large circular area with two such banks, giving an estimated external diameter of around 65 metres and an internal diameter of roughly 40 metres. That double-ringed plan, relatively uncommon and often associated with higher social standing among early Irish society, had already changed considerably by the time the map was revised between 1939 and 1940. By then, only the outer enclosing element along the south-south-east to west to north arc was still legible, and it had been absorbed into the field boundary system. That is what remains today: a broad, overgrown earthen bank sitting on a moderately steep north-facing pasture slope, with an internal height of around 0.9 metres, a width of 4.5 metres, and an external height of 1.6 metres. A shallow outer fosse, the ditch that once ran alongside the bank, is still faintly traceable at about 0.2 metres deep and 2.1 metres wide. The inner bank, so clearly visible to whoever surveyed the area in 1838, has since disappeared entirely from the record.