The one at Derrymore in County Galway offers considerably less. Sitting on a low rise in rolling grassland, this circular enclosure, roughly 36 metres across, has been worn down to the point where only a degraded scarp and the partial trace of an outer fosse remain. A fosse is simply a defensive ditch, dug to accompany the earthen bank of a rath, the Irish term for this type of enclosed farmstead. Here, even that ditch survives only in fragments, curving around from the west through north to the north-east before disappearing entirely.

Raths like this were the standard unit of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically enclosing a family's dwelling, animals, and stores within a raised earthen ring. They were built in their thousands across the country, and many have been absorbed quietly into the landscape over the centuries, ploughed down, built over, or simply left to erode. At Derrymore, the process has gone quite far. Field boundaries, probably laid out long after the rath fell out of use, now cut across the monument at its north-west and north-east edges, breaking the circuit that would once have been a continuous and deliberate boundary. What remains is legible mainly as a slight swelling in the ground, a faint geometry that rewards patience and a low sun more than a quick glance.