The example at Gardenfield in County Galway is one such site, a rath, which is the Irish term for a roughly circular enclosure defined by an earthen bank and internal ditch, typically dating from the early medieval period between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries. These were the farmsteads of their age, home to a family and their animals, and their circular outline, still readable in aerial photographs and satellite imagery long after the banks have softened into the grass, is one of the most persistent shapes in the Irish landscape.

Ringforts of this kind were built not as military fortifications in any serious sense but as enclosed settlements, offering a degree of security for livestock against both animal and human threat. The earthen rampart, sometimes reinforced with a wooden palisade, marked out a household's territory and status as much as it provided physical protection. In Connacht, where Gardenfield lies, the density of such monuments reflects centuries of settled agricultural life during the early Christian period, when the townland, the basic unit of Irish land division, was already taking shape around precisely these kinds of enclosed farms. The name Gardenfield itself suggests later anglicisation layered over a much older landscape, the tidy English word sitting above ground that was already ancient when it was applied.