Within roughly 350 metres of each other in Cloonigny, County Galway, sit two separate ringforts, and the one that survives less gracefully is in some ways the more interesting to consider. Circular, about 44 metres in diameter, and defined by a double bank with a fosse, or ditch, running between the two banks, this rath has been quietly losing its shape for a very long time. Field boundaries have been laid directly over the outer bank at the northwest and southeast, which tells you something about how the landscape was reorganised in the centuries after the fort was abandoned, each generation of farmers treating what came before as raw material rather than monument.

Raths were enclosed farmsteads, typically built during the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries, with earthen banks serving as much to define territory and signal social standing as to provide any serious defence. This one retains a gap of about 3.5 metres on the east-southeast side that may represent the original entrance, a detail that survives where so much else has been compromised. The western arc of the enclosure is now heavily overgrown from the southwest around through to the northwest, meaning the two banks and the fosse between them are difficult to read in that section. What remains legible is partial, but the basic geometry is still there beneath the vegetation and the later field system that has grown up around and over it.