But the arc it traces, roughly thirty metres across, is far older than any modern agricultural arrangement. This is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead built predominantly during the early medieval period, between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries. Thousands of them survive across Ireland in various states of preservation, forming one of the most common archaeological monument types in the country, yet each one carries its own particular story of survival and erosion.

At Gortigrenane, what remains is partial but legible. The western portion of the encircling bank still stands to a height of about 1.25 metres, and the site was clearly enough defined to appear as a circular enclosure on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1934. The fosse, the external ditch that would originally have accompanied the bank and reinforced the enclosure, has since been backfilled, smoothing out one of the key diagnostic features of the site. Two further intrusions have complicated the picture: a road cuts across the northern edge, truncating the circuit, and a field fence running north to south bisects the eastern half of the interior. These are not unusual fates for a ringfort. Centuries of farming have gradually absorbed, dismantled, or simply built over a great many of them, and what survives at Gortigrenane represents a common kind of partial record, enough to identify what was once here, not quite enough to recover the whole.