A slight swelling in the pasture, a curve that the eye half-registers before dismissing it as a trick of the ground. And yet this near-invisible undulation in the ridge at Gortaneden traces the ghost of a rath, an early medieval circular or oval enclosure, typically earthen-banked, that once defined a farmstead or settlement of some local significance. The site sits on a ridge in undulating farmland in County Mayo, and whatever was once enclosed here commanded clear views to the north.

The rath has been largely levelled, though its oval outline can still be traced across a footprint of roughly 45 to 55 metres across. A property fence now bisects the site on a broadly east-west axis, and the two halves tell rather different stories of survival. To the south of the fence, a surviving arc of enclosing bank, roughly 2.75 metres wide with rough stone facing, holds on between the south-east and south, its exterior face still standing to about 0.8 metres. Towards the south-west it diminishes further, surviving only as a stony scarp. North of the fence, the enclosure's curve is legible only as a faint, semi-circular ripple in the ground, the earthwork reduced to something barely distinguishable from natural variation. What makes Gortaneden quietly remarkable is not this one site in isolation, but its company. Three other raths lie within 150 metres, one just 60 metres to the south-west, and a further mound sits roughly 120 metres to the south-east. The ridge was, at some point in the early medieval period, a genuinely busy place.