This one at Dunmain in County Wexford is different. It survives not as an upstanding monument but as a cropmark, a ghostly circular outline roughly thirty metres across that becomes legible only from the air, where differences in soil moisture and vegetation betray the buried remains of an enclosure ditch beneath otherwise ordinary-looking farmland. A slight southward-facing entrance gap can be made out in the aerial images, which is a typical feature of these sites, but there is nothing on the ground to alert a passing walker to what lies beneath.

A rath, to use the Irish term that survives in countless place names, was a farmstead of the early medieval period, typically enclosed by one or more earthen banks and ditches. They are among the most common archaeological monument types in Ireland, numbering in the tens of thousands, yet each one represents a household, a family, a working agricultural unit of roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries. What makes the Dunmain example particularly interesting is its relationship to a neighbouring site. The cropmark enclosure sits directly conjoined to the perimeter of a second rath immediately to its north, the two sharing or abutting a boundary line, a configuration that hints at associated settlement activity or successive phases of use on the same ground. Digital aerial photographs taken in 2006 confirmed the outline of the enclosure and its relationship to that neighbouring site. Archaeological monitoring carried out about fifty metres to the north-east, as part of a separate investigation reported by Sutton in 2018, produced no material directly related to either enclosure.