But the trees are growing inside something older, a roughly circular earthen enclosure about twenty-six metres across, its low bank still traceable beneath the vegetation that has colonised much of it.

This is a rath, the most common type of ringfort in Ireland, typically dating from the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries. Raths were built as enclosed farmsteads, the earthen bank defining a domestic space that might once have contained a house, outbuildings, and pens for livestock. Thousands survive across the Irish countryside, many so absorbed into the working landscape that their form is only legible once you know what to look for. This one sits on a south-south-east-facing slope in Derryleigh, overlooking a stream with moorland and bog stretching out beyond. The bank, which stands only around half a metre high, is heavily overgrown along its eastern to western arc, though a gap roughly two and a half metres wide on the south-east side likely marks the original entrance, a common position for rath entrances relative to the prevailing weather. Smaller breaks occur to the west-north-west, north-west, and east. Inside, coniferous planting has further obscured the interior, and a field boundary now cuts across the northern half of the enclosure on an east-west line, the ordinary business of farming quietly overwriting the much older arrangement beneath it.