At Coolmona, one of those five survives as a roughly circular earthwork about 45 metres across, its bank still standing to a height of around 1.75 metres and its outer fosse, the defensive ditch encircling the bank, still readable at just over a metre deep. Heavily overgrown now and sitting in pasture, it takes a moment to recognise what you are looking at: the remains of an early medieval farmstead enclosure, of the sort that was once among the most common settlement forms across Ireland. Tens of thousands were built, typically between the sixth and tenth centuries, and this one retains enough of its original shape to convey a real sense of the space people once enclosed and defended.

What gives this particular fort a little extra texture is an observation made by a researcher named Hartnett in 1939, who noted traces of an outer rampart beyond the main bank and fosse. A double-ramparted ringfort suggests either a degree of additional status or a desire for extra security, or both; a single bank was the standard arrangement, and anything beyond that was less common. The entrance faces south, which is a reasonably typical orientation for these structures. The more arresting detail, though, remains the collective one: four other ringforts sit nearby, all of them strung along the same valley side above the Shournagh River. Whether they were contemporary with one another, or built across different generations by families who found the same ground consistently attractive, is not recorded, but the clustering points to a stretch of landscape that was actively and repeatedly chosen.