The rath at Carrowbaun does the opposite. Set in gently undulating grassland in County Galway, it survives only as a partial outline, the kind of site that rewards patience and a low sun rather than a casual glance.

A rath is an enclosed farmstead of the early medieval period, typically defined by one or more earthen banks with an outer ditch, or fosse, designed less for military defence than for the practical business of keeping livestock in and wolves out. At Carrowbaun, what remains is a subcircular bank running from the north-north-west around through the east to the south-south-west, tracing roughly half the circuit of what was once a complete enclosure measuring around 49.5 metres on its north-to-south axis. The rest has gone, levelled by ploughing or pasture improvement at some point in the intervening centuries. Traces of the external fosse, the ditch that would originally have sat just outside the bank, are still faintly legible along the northern and eastern arc, shallow depressions in the grass that speak to what the full monument once looked like.

What makes Carrowbaun quietly interesting is precisely its incompleteness. A well-preserved ringfort is easy enough to read; a site like this one asks the eye to do more work, mentally completing the curve from the surviving fragments and imagining the enclosed space as a working farmyard, inhabited and busy, somewhere in the first millennium AD.