Sitting on gently undulating grassland in County Westmeath, amid poorly drained, rushy ground, this circular enclosure has been partially levelled, its bank worn to little more than a smooth scarp visible from the north round to the south-south-west, its external fosse, the shallow ditch that once ran around the outside of the bank, traceable only along a narrow arc from east-north-east to east-south-east. And yet it persists. A Digital Globe aerial photograph taken in November 2011 still captured the outline of the levelled enclosure from above, a ghost circle that ground-level erosion had all but erased.

Ringforts, sometimes called raths, were enclosed farmsteads typical of early medieval Ireland, usually dating from roughly the sixth to the twelfth centuries. Most were home to a single farming family, the bank and fosse serving as a boundary and modest defence for livestock and dwelling. This example, measuring approximately 26 metres across on its north-south axis, was already documented as a circular enclosure on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1837, meaning it was a recognised feature of the landscape nearly two centuries ago. The interior slopes gently from west to east, and low, broad cultivation ridges running roughly west-north-west to east-south-east are still faintly visible, suggesting the enclosed ground was at some point worked for tillage. More intriguing still is what stands, or may stand, in the southern quadrant of the interior: a possible standing stone, a detail that sits slightly outside the usual domestic logic of a rath and raises questions the surviving evidence cannot quite answer. A second ringfort lies just 120 metres to the south-east, making this a part of the Westmeath landscape that was, at some period, actively and multiply settled.