The example at Farrihy, in County Clare, is one such site, a rath sitting in the landscape with the low-key persistence that characterises so many of these earthworks. A rath, for those unfamiliar with the term, is a ringfort defined by one or more circular earthen banks and ditches, typically enclosing a domestic settlement from the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. They were the farmsteads of their age, home to farming families and their livestock, and the banks that once protected them from wolves and rival neighbours have often outlasted everything else.

County Clare is particularly well supplied with these monuments, its geology and land-use history having conspired to preserve earthworks that elsewhere were long ago ploughed flat or built over. Farrihy itself is a townland in this part of the west of Ireland, a unit of land whose name, like most Irish townland names, encodes something of the landscape or its early inhabitants in an anglicised fragment of older Irish. Without more detailed survey information having been published for this specific site, the precise dimensions, condition, and any associated finds remain difficult to characterise. What can be said is that its classification as a rath places it within a monument type that archaeologists associate overwhelmingly with the early medieval period, and that even a modest, unexcavated example can preserve buried evidence of the people who once lived within its banks.