At Cloonee in County Galway, a circular rath sits on a gentle rise above the surrounding low-lying grassland, its defining bank interrupted on the eastern side where a later field wall has been built directly over it. The overlap is mundane in one sense, the ordinary business of agricultural life continuing across centuries, but it also marks the point at which one era simply stopped noticing another.

The rath measures roughly 35.5 metres in diameter. A rath is an early medieval enclosure, typically dating from somewhere between the sixth and tenth centuries, built of earthen banks and used as a farmstead or family compound. This one is poorly preserved, its form still legible but worn. More intriguing is what may lie beneath the surface: a probable souterrain has been identified within the interior. Souterrains are underground stone-lined passages or chambers associated with ringforts across Ireland, most likely used for storage or as places of refuge. Whether or not this one is fully intact is uncertain, the qualifying word probable carrying real weight here. A separate earthwork lies about 50 metres to the south, its relationship to the rath unclear but suggestive of a wider pattern of activity in the landscape.