Look more carefully, though, and the geometry begins to assert itself. That shallow circular depression in the turf, paired with an arc of earthen bank to the southeast, is what survives of a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, the single most common monument type in the Irish landscape. These were typically the enclosed farmsteads of early medieval landowners, their earthen banks defining a domestic space that was as much about social status as physical defence.

The surviving bank reaches 1.4 metres in height where it endures, and a shallow external fosse, or ditch, still reads in the ground at around 0.45 metres deep. That the bank has been absorbed into the existing field fence system is a small piece of agricultural pragmatism stretching back generations; farmers rarely demolished what could be repurposed. The interior, once the living and working area of an early medieval household, now presents as nothing more dramatic than a gentle bowl in the pasture on a north-facing slope. The fosse that originally ran around the outside, lending the enclosure both its definition and its name, has been reduced to a faint crease in the ground, but it remains legible to anyone who knows what to look for.