At the foot of a steep north-east-facing slope in the Comeragh Mountains, a low grassy ring sits quietly in the Waterford uplands, its edges partly swallowed by a later field boundary. That boundary is part of what makes this site quietly awkward to read: the enclosing bank, built from earth and stone, has been incorporated into agricultural field walls at some point, pulling the shape of the enclosure out of true and leaving only the north-west to south-east arc looking anything like its original self.

A rath, as these earthwork enclosures are generally known, is a roughly circular defended farmstead typical of early medieval Ireland, usually dated somewhere between the sixth and twelfth centuries, though the form persisted in places beyond that range. This particular example is subcircular rather than perfectly round, measuring approximately 32 metres north to south and 29 metres east to west. The bank that defines it is between three and five metres wide, standing just under half a metre above the interior ground level at its lowest, and reaching up to about 1.4 metres on the exterior where better preserved. A narrow entrance, only 1.5 metres wide, faces north-west. What makes the Glenpatrick site especially interesting from a landscape perspective is that it does not stand alone: a second rath sits roughly 50 metres to the north-east, suggesting that two enclosed settlements once occupied this ground in close proximity, perhaps contemporaneously, perhaps in sequence.