Stones pulled from nearby fields have been tipped into the ditch surrounding it until that ditch is barely a ditch at all. And yet the underlying structure has held its shape remarkably well, an earthen enclosure that once marked a homestead boundary and still reads clearly in the landscape if you know what you are looking at.

This is a rath, the most common type of monument in the Irish countryside. Raths, also called ringforts, were typically built during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries, and served as enclosed farmsteads for individual family groups. They were defined by one or more circular or oval earthen banks, sometimes topped with a timber palisade, with an outer ditch, known as a fosse, providing additional depth to the boundary. The Carrowreagh example survives in good structural detail. The oval interior measures approximately 26 metres east to west and 22 metres north to south. The bank surrounding it is around 4.4 metres wide and stands nearly 3 metres high on its outer face in the better-preserved sections, though it has eroded to a lower scarp on the western and north-eastern sides. The fosse at the outer foot of the bank is around 4.45 metres wide, and a causeway, roughly 5 metres across, crosses it at the north-east. That causeway marks the position of the original entrance, the point through which people and livestock would have passed in and out of the enclosure on a daily basis. The fosse itself has been largely filled in on all sides over the years with debris cleared from surrounding fields, the kind of slow, practical burial that happens when a boundary ditch becomes a convenient place to dump stones.