At Coole in County Cork, a rath sits in open pasture on a north-east-facing slope, and what makes it particularly unusual is that it is conjoined with a neighbouring ringfort, the two enclosures meeting along a shared stretch of earthwork rather than standing as separate monuments in the same field.

Ringforts, sometimes called raths when they are earthen rather than stone-built, were the typical enclosed farmsteads of early medieval Ireland, broadly in use from around the fifth to the twelfth century. A family would raise a circular bank and ditch around their home and yard, as much for livestock management and social display as for any serious defensive purpose. This example at Coole is roughly circular, with a diameter of about 27 metres. Its defining bank survives to a modest height of around 0.75 metres along the eastern to western arc, while to the west and north-west the bank of the adjoining ringfort, standing slightly taller at about 1.2 metres, effectively forms the boundary. A field fence completes the circuit from the north-west back round to the east. The interior is level and slightly raised above the surrounding ground, a common feature in earthworks that have been left undisturbed in pasture for centuries. The pairing of two ringforts in this way is relatively rare and raises questions that the earthworks alone cannot answer: whether the enclosures were contemporary, whether they housed related households, or whether one was added to the other at a later date.