The rath at Gilroe, in County Galway, offers rather less. Sitting on a low ridge roughly 160 metres north of the lake known as Loughaundoongorey, it survives in a state of considerable deterioration, its subcircular outline measuring approximately 27 metres east to west and 22 metres north to south. Dense overgrowth now claims most of the site, and what structure remains consists of a bank running from the north-east around to the east, and a scarp, essentially a slope or cut edge in the ground, continuing from the east around to the south. A rath, to use the Irish term, was a type of enclosed farmstead typical of the early medieval period, its residents protected by an earthen bank and ditch rather than stone. Here, the western arc of that enclosure survives only as a curving line of vegetation, and the northern side is suggested by a field bank that may or may not preserve the original boundary.

What makes this particular site quietly interesting is not what it retains but what it barely retains. The curving band of vegetation along the western edge is the kind of detail that rewards a careful eye. Plants, particularly certain shrubs and rushes, have a tendency to follow buried or disturbed ground, tracing the ghost of a feature long after the earthwork itself has been levelled by agriculture or simply by time. The field bank to the north raises the same interpretive question, whether it represents a genuine survival of the rath's enclosing element or simply a later field boundary that happened to follow a convenient line. That ambiguity is, in its way, characteristic of a great many early medieval sites in the Irish landscape, where the evidence is fragmentary and the conclusions remain provisional.