Somewhere on the Kildare plain, a cluster of trees rising from otherwise flat pasture marks something that most people passing through stud-farm country would take for an ornamental planting. It is, in fact, the remains of a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, the kind of enclosed farmstead that was the standard unit of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland. What survives at Derrinstown has been shaped, at some point, into a deliberate landscape feature, the trees planted within and around it as if to give the old earthwork a second life as a piece of parkland design.