The one at Coole in County Cork does something rather different. It sits on level ground amid tillage, its enclosing scarp worn down to a maximum height of just half a metre, so that the whole thing risks disappearing into the rhythm of a ploughed field.

A rath, as this type of monument is also known, is a roughly circular enclosure defined by an earthen bank and ditch, built during the early medieval period and typically associated with a farmstead or the home of a person of local standing. The example at Coole measures approximately forty metres in diameter, a fairly typical size for the form. What survives is the scarp, the sloped inner or outer face of what was once a more substantial bank, along with gaps in the circuit to the south-southwest and north-northwest. Whether those openings represent original entrances or later breaks caused by agricultural activity is not certain, though the fact that both the bank and the interior are under tillage suggests the site has been subject to sustained disturbance. That the outline is still legible at all, reduced as it is, says something about the durability of even modest earthworks across more than a thousand years of farming.