The example at Gorteen in County Mayo is one such site, a rath sitting in the landscape of Connacht with little fanfare and, for now, limited documentation in the public record.

A rath is a ringfort of earthen construction, typically a roughly circular enclosure defined by one or more banks and ditches, built during the early medieval period, broadly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. They functioned primarily as enclosed farmsteads, the homes of farming families of varying social rank, and their earthwork boundaries served as much for the management of livestock as for defence. Mayo contains a considerable number of these monuments, a reflection of the province's dense early medieval settlement, and the Gorteen example belongs to this wider pattern of rural occupation that shaped the pre-Norman Irish landscape in ways still legible from the air and, with a careful eye, from the ground.