Others have been reduced to a whisper, visible only from the air and only under the right conditions. The rath at Graigue Little, County Wexford, belongs firmly to the second category. What remains is not a monument you can walk around and appreciate at ground level; it is a faint cropmark, a ghostly D-shaped outline roughly 35 metres across at its longest, pressed into the soil and readable only on aerial photographs.

A rath, or ringfort, is a roughly circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, typically built during the early medieval period as a farmstead for a single family and their livestock. At Graigue Little, the enclosure sits on an east-facing slope, with a small stream running south to north about 150 metres to the east, the kind of well-watered, sheltered position that early farmers consistently favoured. The defining feature of this particular site is a fosse, a defensive ditch, which traces the outline of the enclosure on most sides. On the south-east, however, where a field bank runs north-east to south-west, the fosse disappears from view entirely, either obscured by later agricultural activity or simply not surviving in that portion. The site measures approximately 20 metres on its shorter axis, giving the enclosure its characteristic D-shape rather than a true circle.