That persistence of local memory is often the most durable thing about a site: the earthwork erodes, the banks are levelled for grazing or ploughing, and yet generations of farmers continue to name the ground after something they can no longer quite see.

What once stood here was a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, which is a roughly circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches. Ringforts were the standard form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically housing a single farmstead and its occupants sometime between roughly the sixth and twelfth centuries. The Gortmolire example sat atop a hill in pasture land and was recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842 as a hachured circular enclosure approximately thirty-five metres in diameter, a modest but entirely typical size. By the time more recent observers visited, the structure had been levelled, leaving only a slight depression in the ground to mark where the bank once ran. That shallow dip is easy to miss, particularly under grass, but it is the kind of detail that repays a slow walk across a field with your eyes on the contours of the soil rather than the horizon.