The one at Doory in County Longford does the opposite, occupying a slight hollow in undulating pasture, as though it had quietly subsided into the landscape rather than been built to command it. That positioning, combined with centuries of weathering and the dumping of boulders and smaller stones directly onto the monument, means it now requires a certain attentiveness to read properly.

A rath, to use the Irish term for an earthen ringfort, was typically a circular enclosure bounded by one or more banks and ditches, used as a farmstead and dwelling during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. The Doory example is modest in scale, roughly twenty metres in diameter. Its enclosing bank of earth and stone survives to a height of only about thirty centimetres on the western and north-western sides, worn down to little more than a low ridge two and a half metres wide. Elsewhere, the boundary is marked not by a bank at all but by a scarp, a slight natural or cut edge in the ground, rising to around forty centimetres. At the southern side, the base of this scarp still retains traces of a wide, shallow fosse, the ditch that would originally have reinforced the enclosure's boundary, five metres across but now only thirty centimetres deep. A report from 1976 noted that the original entrance into the enclosure faced east, a common orientation for ringforts and one that would have caught the morning light.