But what sits on that rise in the townland of Dervotstown is a ringfort with an unusually elaborate set of defences, the kind of earthwork that suggests whoever built it was serious about the idea of not being easily reached. Two substantial earthen banks enclose a roughly circular interior roughly 44 metres across, and between those banks runs a wide, deep fosse, with a second fosse beyond the outer bank for good measure. A ringfort, to put it plainly, is a circular enclosure of earthen banks or stone walls built during the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries, and typically used as a defended farmstead. Most are single-banked affairs. A double-banked example with two fosses, a fosse being a defensive ditch, marks something a step above the ordinary.

The entrance survives on the eastern side of the inner bank, a gap just 1.8 metres wide, with a causeway still crossing the inner fosse. The outer bank has been disturbed at the same eastern point, and any corresponding gap or causeway there has been lost. Inside, a shallow natural depression sits in the south-eastern quadrant of the enclosure. The fort does not stand alone in the landscape. A burial site lies 130 metres to the north-east, two further ringforts sit within 500 metres to the west and west-north-west, and Dervotstown Castle lies 330 metres to the south-south-east, a reminder that this corner of Westmeath was occupied and organised across many centuries and by people of very different eras.